The 95th Tour de France has been taking place from July 5 -27, 2008. For this great cycling event, Google has placed its first Street Views of France on-line.

The 360° Views are to be found in Google Maps, Google’s local search wing. By clicking on “Street View”, a virtual view of the entire race routing is to be found. What’s more, the view is presented from the rider’s perspective, as was reported by Google employee Daniel Ratner in the Google Lat Long Blog.  According to Ratner, the absolute latest features of Street View have been implemented for the 21-stage France tour, encompassing ‘Face Blurring’ and high image resolution (see our post).

So, for the first time users are able to access panorama views of Europe, via Google Maps.  Until this introduction, users were only able to view USA cities, national parks and recreational areas in Street View.  The Tour-de-France route is only the beginning ― Google has already announced that views of other European cities and areas will be forthcoming (see our report).  At the moment, German cities are being documented (as noted in the Google Watch Blog). Street-View cars have been already spied in Munich and Berlin– confirmed by a report in the Berlin Tagesspiegel, which also mentions that Google is also shooting in Frankfurt am Main.  When these Street Views will be posted on-line is any body’s guess.

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.

The USA-version of Google Maps now offers yet another new feature.  The search engine giant has now integrated its panorama view “Street View” into its route planner.

Thereby users are able to orient themselves before their journey as to the waypoints and local features, as outlined by Google staffer Andy Szybalski in Google Lat Long Blog.  This works only for localities where street views have been documented and released. Whether or not this feature is available, is indicated by a camera icon within the route instructions generated.