Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Google Street View Cars Ready To Rumble

posted by Satri on Wednesday July 18, @01:43PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the watching-the-watchman dept.
Google Web Mapping
tprinty writes "Looks like Google is getting their street view fleet in order big time. A tipster to Gizmodo took some screenshots of a dozen Chevy Cobalts ready to hit the streets. Smile! Your on Google Maps!" From the Gizmodo article (with screenshot): "It was an entire fleet of at least 30 brand-new Chevy Cobalt cars parked behind the building, most without license plates yet. As you can see in the pictures above, each had a metal device attached to its top, which looks suspiciously like a vertical extension for mounting Google's Streetview 360° camera."

Related Stories

Google Launches Street View and Mapplets at Where 2.0 2007 9 comments [+]
Slashdot discuss the Google announcement of their new Street View and Mapplets feature. Their summary: "Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme." The GEB covers the launch. Of course, you can read about it from the Official Google Lat Long Blog. See related stories below.
Google's StreetView Imagery Removing Process 1 comment [+]
Google's recent StreetView feature generated a lot of ink lately. All Points Blog links to a Wired article describing how people can indicate Google to remove imagery where they can be seen. From the article: "Google has blinked, backing down from its demand for my driver's license and a sworn statement and agreeing not to use the information I submit for any purpose other than processing my request." Google product counsel Daphne Keller personally phoned Bankston to tell him about the change in policy, and then Google's help desk sent him the new requirements: [...] (1) Your name (2) The location of the image in our service [...] That means Google has no content-based standard for a take-down, and no verification that the requester is the person pictured."
Technology: Tele Atlas Mapping Toronto's Streets in 3D [+]
The DataLibre blog informs us that Toronto will soon have street view data acquired by Tele Atlas. From the blog: "This CBC.ca video gives a brief on how 2d and 3d street view data are collected. In this case it is the city of Toronto and the data collector is Tele Atlas. [...] At 500 km a day and terrabytes of data, these folks are collecting and selling tons of geo-information that we like to play with on google earth, help find places in mapquest, and allow city planners or police forces to prepare evacuation plans, understand the characteristics of the route planned for a protest or know the point address in a 911 call."
Technology: Google Maps Adds Coverage for 54 Countries. 1 comment [+]
Google Product Manager Dave Barth writes from the Google Lat Long Blog, "Here's great news for all of the virtual explorers out there: Today we added 54 new countries to Google Maps! We've more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before." Some of the more interesting additions include: Afganistan, Iran (I'm guessing no StreetView with that anytime soon), Pakistan, Syria, and of course the one everyone was clamoring for, Timor-Leste.
Inside the Google Street View Beetle [+]
Slashdot discuss a story on Google Street View data acquisition. Their summary: "Popular Mechanics takes a ride in an Immersive Media VW Beetle, one of the six cars that drives around America shooting images for Google Maps Street View. Mounted on the roof is the $45,000 Dodeca 2360 video camera, whose 11 lenses record a 360 degree field of view at 30 frames per second, sucking up as many as 200 miles of city scenes per day. The setup takes up the whole back seat and part of the front passenger seat, and is all controlled with an off-the-shelf Logitech game controller. Includes a cool interactive raw video of a drive through Manhattan."
Technology: New Google Maps Features Launched Including Collaborative Mapping [+]
In addition to the important new terrain layer announced yesterday, Google Maps received a few significant updates, first, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, second, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Google Street View Cars Ready To Rumble | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 2 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.