There goes the neighborhood. The world-organizers at Google have introduced an impressive implementation of street-level mapping in Google Maps. They’re calling it Street View, and it allows users of Google Maps to get a virtual-reality view of selected city streets.
The photo-based VR experiences are similar to previously announced products from Microsoft and Amazon, but have a very fluid, natural, and (I must say) cute interface.
Clicking the ‘Street View’ button at the top of the map (in areas with this feature — including San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Denver, Miami, NYC, and Las Vegas among others) produces a little orange person-shaped figure, that falls onto the map (complete with a slight bounce!). From the orange person’s head emerges a familiar Google Maps balloon, filled with a draggable, 360° panoramic photo of that location.
Street information is superimposed, and arrows allow you to go for a virtual ‘walk’ down the street. Dragging the photo allows one to pan and tilt the view, and causes a green marker under the orange person’s feet on the map to rotate and point in the direction of your current view for reference. Double-clicking or operating the slider allows the viewer to zoom in and out in four steps.
My favorite interface touch comes when you click and drag the orange person icon to move “him” to a new location for a different view. Rather than just moving under your cursor, the little figure bends as if flying or being lifted by the hand of God with an ‘X-marks-the-spot’ cross on the ground below to indicate his intended drop point (when you let go of your mouse button).
There’s a surprising amount of detail in the photos, especially at full zoom. Though the quality of some of the VR constructions is a little lacking (sun flares abound, VR seams are often sloppy, and busses and other passersby often block views), the speed of the implementation makes the experience satisfyingly fluid.
Already, however, the level of zoom detail has unnerved the privacy-conscious. BoingBoing reports on many discoveries of interesting things in the Street Views, including a woman who reports that the detail around her apartment is good enough to look through her window and see her cat inside! (Take a look at the cat for yourself »)
Much discussion is taking place regarding Google’s use of images without making an effort to obscure faces and other details. Similar controversy surrounded Amazon’s now-gone1 A9 block-level photos. Interestingly, Yahoo and Microsoft go on the record to say that they would never do something as privacy-invading as Google’s implementation.
Is it an invasion, though? Google argues that the imagery is all taken from public spots, and is no more invasive that walking down a street with a camera. Further, they are quick to point to a form available to request that an image be removed from the database.
Perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps Microsoft is right when it argues that the utility for such imagery is just not there (Erik Jorgensen tells CNET “The feedback we got was that people like visuals as cues integrated into driving directions” but not to explore a ‘virtual world’).
Time will tell. For now, though, I’ll leave you with one last bit of interesting info — the car and patented 11-lens camera that captures some of the content for Google’s Street View. (Link »)
Be sure to smile if you see it coming down your street.
Update 6/2: GrokDotCom has discovered that Street View features seemingly illegal photos of the inside of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in NYC… Link »
Update 6/2: I hate to update yet again, but this archive at Threat Level is worth a look — it’s a reader compilation of odd (and/or scandalous) images in the Street View database. This is like one big scavenger hunt… Link »
Many newspaper sites these days put up a ’subscription curtain’ where some (or all) of their content or archives are restricted to subscribers only.
I’ll probably write up a review of this in the next day or two, having spent the last day living in it, but 
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