Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
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Noticed tonight on Wired that Google Street View is now live on Google Maps, so go check it out. True, it’s not new - Microsoft already had a beta test of their version of this type of thing out. It’s also a bit Orwellian in that it seems like a bit of invasion of personal privacy - allowing voyeuristic users to zoom in on images of real folks caught about their daily business by clicking here and there on a web-based map in a browser. I don’t really like the way it all works so much - you have to look for roads or places that are outlined in BLUE, and then drag a little avatar guy onto that outlined portion of the map. Once you perform this rather cludgey manipulation a video window akin to those 3D Quicktime mov files appears with which you can interact and ‘move’ about the real images of a ’street view’.