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Google Maps Street View

History

• Launched for 5 American cities in May 2007.
• Now (August 2008) covers all or parts of hundreds of cities in 5 countries – US, France, Italy, Japan and Australia.
• Street Views for major Australian cities and towns available since August 4 2008.

Technique

Mount a special camera on the roof of a car.

• Drive up and down every street in the city, taking 360 degrees worth of street-level photos every 10 metres.
• Knit them together back in the computer lab.
• Add them to Google Maps (and Google Earth)
• “Face blurring” to obscure people's faces and car registration plate numbers.
  

Australian coverage

• Start from a low zoom level
• Small towns may or may not be covered.
• More often than not, the camera car just drove along the main street (or the main highway through town) but no side streets.

Other features

• Full screen view
• Send links to friends (via the Link link in top right corner of viewport)

Galleries of interesting shots

Google Street View Gallery - http://streetviewgallery.corank.com/ includes:

• Aussie Lady of the Night
• Stuffed Animal house, Detroit
• I35W bridge in Minneapolis prior to its Aug 1 07 collapse

Future

Countries currently being filmed – Canada, New Zealand, German, Spain, United Kingdom.

Google Earth

Includes Street View as well.

Google Earth KML Gallery - http://earth.google.com/gallery/index.html
Examples:

• Rising sea level animation
  
• Population density
  

Sky in Google Earth

(http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html)

• Search for “Hubble Ultra Deep Field”
• Tiny corner of the sky – one tenth the diameter of the moon as we see it – 1 thirteen millionth of the sky.
• Contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies.
• Galaxies date from only 800 million years after the Big Bang.
• Compiled from imagery taken by 2 Hubble Telescope cameras over 11 days, Sept 03 – Jan 04.

New feature

Introducing the Pancake: A less annoying way to move through Google street view - review from TechCrunch
Google maps finally gives me the feature I've wanted from day 1 - What's here? - review from TechCrunch