Posts Tagged ‘Geburtstag’

At the end of May 2008, the Google Maps feature “Street View” celebrated its first birthday.  On the occasion of its birthday, its creators added recently a bunch of new parorama views.

For this purpose the drivers of the Google-Street-View cars (fitted out with special 360º cameras) spread out over 37 ‘new’ USA areas, shooting or reshooting a whole lot of new photos. As detailed in a post in the Google Lat Long Blog, programmer Jiajun Zhu revealed that with this new surge, the coverage of Street-View is doubled.

Twenty new cities and urban areas, including Springfield, Atlanta, Oklahoma and Reno, as well as the addition of ten National Parks and Recreational areas such as the Everglades National Park, Death Valley National Park and the Florida Keys, have been newly documented at close range. The survey of cities such as Kansas City, Miami, Nashville, San Francisco or New York City have also been expanded.

Simultaneously, according to Zhu, the photo quality has been improved, and the glimpses of the Street-View car have been removed from photos– when looking at street level, one now sees the street itself, instead of the roof of the car on which the camera is mounted.  Face-Blurring technology has now been fully implemented, thereby rendering the faces of pedestrians and license plates unrecognizable.

Although until recently only cities and regions in the USA were viewable using the Street-View technology, results are now also viewable in the German-language editions under the label “Straßenansicht”.  This link appears on the map, whenever areas or locations are displayed where the photo-documentation has been published.