Items tagged with Street-View
Google Street View is a great way to explore a new area and plan out vacations or a big move before you hit the road. You can check out images of entire neighborhoods along with places to shop and eat so you know where things are and what they look like when you get there. The catch is that in some areas Street View imagery is simply not available. Google is looking to fix that with the new Street View Ready program that will allow anyone to add images to Street View if they are using a certified camera. The catch is that there is only one supported camera right now and it is the Insta360 Pro. The big downside to this is that the camera sells for $3,499, definitely putting a crimp on your...
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If you have ever seen a Google Street View car gliding around with its camera rig on top taking pictures of your area, your first inclination might be to spam the cameras by doing something silly. I mean you certainly wouldn't be the first person to point at your junk or play dead for the cameras. Google has reportedly upgraded the Street View camera fleet to gather more information to feed its machine learning and AI tech back at home base. According to a report from Wired, this is the first significant update to the tech used by the Street View fleet in eight years. Previously, the camera towers mounted to the roof of the car housed 15 cameras to capture footage. The new Street View camera...
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Google Maps’ Street View has helped completely change how we’re able to see the world. Indeed, Street View makes navigation far easier than ever before, but it also allows us to see into places from the comfort of our own homes. For instance, there’s the “Skyfall” island in Japan, the Grand Canyon, and more, and the search giant is also now mapping Ellis Island and Liberty Island, site of the Statue of Liberty. According to the New York Times, it’s taken a long time and a lot of complication to gain access to Liberty and Ellis Islands, both of which are operated by the National Park Service. Credit: Michael Appleton/New York Times “For the first time,...
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We take a short break from all the frenetic and amazing happenings at Computex to bring you a hilarious/not-so-hilarious story of a Scottish fellow who spoofed the Google Street View car and got himself a visit from the local authorities. Back in August of 2012, Dan Thompson, owner of Tomson Motor, saw the Google Street View car coming down the street and--thinking quickly--laid down on the ground and had a buddy stand over him wielding a pickaxe handle. It looked like a murder, and a couple of years later when a random web user spotted it, that person reported it to the police. We’re pretty sure the Google Street View folks would have A) noticed a murder taking place feet from the car...
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Google Maps has been around for a good long while now, and the search (er, maps) giant is still updating its images of the whole world in order to keep those Street View shots as current as possible. Now, with a catalog of aging photos, Google has opted to make something cool out them instead of just dumping them into the abyss of history. “Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop”, wrote Vinay Shet, Google Street View Product Manager in a blog post. “We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule...
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That cool, creepy abandoned island fortress from the latest James Bond movie “Skyfall”? That wasn’t a movie set. It’s a real place called Battleship Island, and it’s located off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. And Google sent a couple of employees (who we presume have nerves of steel) to the uninhabited island to map it for Google Maps Street View. Battleship Island (real name: “Hashima”) was once a busy coal mining facility and housed some 5,000 people. When the coal mining industry struggled in the 1970s, the island was abandoned, only opening up certain areas to tourists in 2009. Battleship Island Now you can see into many of the hidden-away...
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It’s just a publicity stunt, but like any great publicity stunt, this one is worth buying into: Google used Street View to map out the Moto X factory in Texas, offering a long look at the facility in lovely, full screen glory. The plant, which officially launched yesterday, promises that it can crank out up to tens of millions of units every year--which is to say, it’s capable of scaling up production far beyond the 100,000 Moto X’s per week that it’s currently producing--and because there’s never been a smartphone actually manufactured in the U.S., people are watching this plant’s success very closely. And if you’re the sort who’s interested in...
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Whether or not you believe Google when it says that it didn’t mean to snoop data from WiFi networks while its Street View cars traversed the globe, the fact of the matter is that the company was sloppy with its code and ended up snagging data it wasn’t supposed to have. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK has been interested in this issue since at least 2010, when it tasked Google with performing an internal audit concerning this WiFi snooping. Now, the agency has told Google that it must delete the data it still has within 35 days, and if it finds more disks containing additional data, Google must destroy that, as well. A failure to eliminate the data, the...
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Google has been fined $7 million dollars in a case over the company’s WiFi snooping, which occurred between 2008-2010 as Google Street View cars crisscrossed the country mapping everything in sight. Google Street View is a gloriously powerful tool, but the fleet of Street View mapping cars were collecting data such as passwords from the WiFi networks they cruised past in addition to snapping photos. Several reports indicate that a lone rogue engineer was responsible for the data collection, although others at the company eventually learned of the practice and didn’t do anything about it. Even so, Google maintains that it didn’t break any laws and that the company thought is...
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Google Maps has changed the way we navigate the world, whether it’s planning out a trip (or adjusting on the fly), using your smartphone to figure out where the dang ballet studio is, having a Street View look at the town you’re about to move to, and so on, and the service just keeps getting better. This fall, Google announced that it was sending a team of Googlers to hike the Grand Canyon wearing backpacks called “Trekkers” (which weigh 40 pounds!) upon which are mounted 360-degree cameras (with a 15-lens system!), and apparently those people have been busy. Google announced that 75 miles of trails and roads in and around the Grand Canyon are now available for viewing....
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Users frustrated with Apple’s built-in maps app in iOS 6 have another option: use Google Maps in the Safari mobile web browser. Today, Google announced that its the mobile web-based version of its maps service was getting even better with the addition of Street View on mobile web browsers. Using Street View on your mobile device is the same as on the desktop--pull up a location on map.google.com and click the little “pegman” on the bottom right of the screen, and you’ll be able to see your location at street level with all the panning capabilities you’re used to. If you peek at Google’s blog post, you’ll notice that all of the screenshots are superimposed...
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We can’t remember how we got around before Google Maps; scratch that, actually we do, but we try to forget, because the present technology is so much better, easier to use, and more powerful. Not content to sit on its laurels, though, Google announced some significant upgrades to Google Maps at an event in San Francisco. First off, Street View is going off road with Street View Trekker. Simply put, Google has evolved its Street View scope from car-mounted cameras on roads to the tricycle camera shooting harder-to-reach places to spelunkers documenting caves. Now, the company has developed a backpack-mounted camera that a person can schlep pretty much anywhere in the world; you can see very...
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