Google Street View, Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:39:16 +0000

Google Street View inside the San Diego Art Institute gardens

It’s time for Google to rename its Street View feature. Google Maps’ Street View is no longer limited to streets, the company is now using tricycles to photograph off-road locations like the gardens at the San Diego Art Institute or Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, France.

Google has been using the modified trikes — which house a 360° panoramic camera much like the setup on the Street View cars, but smaller and lighter — since 2009. Google previously released imagery the trikes captured in places like Stonehenge and Sea World.

Combine the latest update with Google’s previous release of Street View inside buildings and it isn’t hard to imagine that, in the future, Street View may well be in your living room.

In fact, you may be the one who puts Street View in your living room. Last year Google acquired Quiksee, an app that takes normal video input and produces video tours — much like Street View, but with no special camera required. Although Google has made no announcements since the acquisition, it’s not hard to imagine the company releasing some software that allows anyone to create Street View-like images of, well, just about anywhere.

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Google and Arcade Fire Get All HTML5y

Michael Calore — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:56:57 +0000

The good folks at Google have published a very cool multimedia showcase for what’s possible in HTML5. Using music by Arcade Fire (the 21st century hipster equivalent of ELO), filmmaker Chris Milk has made an interactive video of sorts that spans multiple browser windows.

Eliot Van Buskirk has a full write-up, including an interview with Milk, over on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

“The Wilderness Downtown,” features HTML5 native video and audio, canvas-animated birds that fly away from your mouse clicks, interactive SVG fonts, and photo panoramas from Google Maps Street View. You enter in the address of where you grew up and it pulls the images for that neighborhood. The neighborhood of my childhood home wasn’t available, so I opted for the section of Burlington, Vermont I lived in throughout college. It was creepy to see my old house in an Arcade Fire video.

Being Google-produced, the experiment works best in Google Chrome, of course. It had problems playing back properly in Firefox 4 beta.

If you have Chrome and can watch it, it really strikes a chord. It goes beyond all the HTML5 vs Flash dogma and presents what’s possible with these new technologies in a way which resonates on a level that’s more emotional and immediate than nerdy and intellectual.

So who do I talk to at Google about getting them to do one of these things for my band?

This post was updated at 2:45 PDT. The original incorrectly said it was a YouTube experiment. The site was created by the Google Chrome team, not YouTube.

See Also:

Webmonkey » Google Maps Street View

Google Street View, Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You

Google and Arcade Fire Get All HTML5y