This picture shows the Google Street View of Commercial Street, Mount Gambier. The visual mapping service was launched in Australia today.
The sheer enormity of the task is quite overwhelming to contemplate.
I originally assumed they must be high-powered satellite images. Incredibly, a team of people drove around the country – and this is a big country – video mapping every street from Holden Astra vehicles.
If anyone doubted the extraordinary power of Google, doubt no more.
Apparently they were careful not to identify faces or licence plates. I wonder how many times they had to drive up and down busy streets to achieve that objective? And how long before someone discovers an exception?
Mount Gambier was mapped in summer. I can tell from the image of our house, which shows dry grass and for-sale signs out the front.
Amazing.
Update: The Official Google Australia Blog reports: “Street View features technology that blurs identifiable faces and vehicle license plates are unidentifiable. If you consider that Street View contains imagery that you consider sensitive or inappropriate, you can easily flag it for removal.”
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Can I hire them to come to Warren and street view my town? I’m tired of google giving me a black and white ‘spot’ where my house is supposed to stand (from before it was BUILT!). hahaha
That is kinda creepy though.
Twitter: mgorey
says:
It’s sort of creepy but awesome. I wonder how much they pay those people in the cars and how they recruit them?
Twitter: delmerw
says:
I’m pretty sure I saw the mapping vehicle out and about last spring or summer. One of the engineers and I were at lunch and drove past a van that looked like it was outfitted to take photos or video from multiple sides.
As you make your way down Main Street in my little town there’s a section where it’s daylight for a while, then evening for a mouse click (headlights are on) then daylight once more. So they made at least two trips down Main.
The whole thing is pretty amazing.