Google Maps Street View photo capture system just got an upgrade — if you’d like to see one in the wild, here’s what you’re going to be looking for, soon.
One of the most interesting and useful Google Maps innovations is Street View, a system that allows users to see realistic 360-degree imagery of streets, buildings, and landmarks in all their real-world glory. Street View is now 15 years old, but it started as a research project at Stanford that employed Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car as the starting point for a global initiative. At the heart of the photo-filled Street View are an array of specialized camera rigs. Google has all of its special Street View Ready camera specifications posted publicly for those that wish to replicate the design. But Street View is not just a method for taking a virtual tour of a place from the comfort of one’s living room. It’s also a time machine. In the past few years, Google has made Street View into a system that offers a peek into the past. If you’re using Street View with Google Maps on your desktop machine now, you can check for an icon of a clock in the upper right-hand corner of your screen to view historical imagery of that particular place or landmark. This functionality will also be available on mobile devices soon (if it’s not already active by the time you read this article). In a nutshell, Google Maps Street View is a digital time capsule living in a mapping and navigation service. To mark its 15th anniversary, Google is giving a hardware boost to the Street View system and is also bringing some of its tricks to mobile. But for a project of this scale and worldwide impact, it is surprising to know that a bunch of Googlers used their extra time (from the company’s famed « 20% time » concept), to come up with the idea and execute it.
