Google Street View - The Way Finding of the Future?

A few weeks ago I spent two and a half hours standing (literally) at the counter of the US Airway check-in counter trying to secure a ticket to San Francisco using a free travel voucher. (No, the online efforts just didn't work for this one. Another story.)

For most of that time I watched the attendant (the second most patient man on the planet) hold the phone to his ear while he tried to get through to his own inventory department. Apparently they have just merged with another airline and the booking system has gone to hell. Once in a while we spoke and he would tell me that getting to San Francisco is almost impossible because everyone wants to go there.

I didn't know that. Frankly the bulk of my knowledge of SF came from watching "Bullit" eons ago, oh, and more recently "The Pursuit of Happiness".

So last week I got to San Francisco. And it didn't take long to see why it's so hard to book a flight there. I fell in love with the place and as I drove around the glistening streets I kept thinking "Must tell the folks back home. Mom and Dad would love it here. My kids would love it here. The lady at the bake shop would love it here..."

I took hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the incredible architecture, the street scenes and everything else I saw. I wanted to bring a virtual reality of it all back home.

What I fool I was. This week I find this:

We are all accustomed to regarding Google as the saviour of the Internet when it comes to web searches. Frankly life without Google is unimaginable to me. But with their (new!) StreetViews project I am still stunned by the magnitude of the project and the impact that it has even if it is still a little wet behind the ears.

Here are some of the things that strike me:

• The immersive experience is immediately convincing. It even has continuity of transient objects (traffic) as one moves around. You can follow cars on the freeway for example. We may pass a garbage truck and watch instances of the garbage collector do his thing over time.
• Clearly they've attached some very unique camera equipment to the roof of their Mini (I don't know it's a Mini but I like to think it is) shooting at all critical angles at once. (Try the rotate buttons!)
• This special equipment thing may be an impediment unless Google launches an army of Pan-Optical-Minis* to prowl the streets of the planet. One can almost imagine the cachet (pun intended) of being caught on this cameras and being immortalized in the Google database. You might be known forever (that means until the next rev) as the guy or gal who is jay walking at Times Square looking like a deer in headlights at billions of Google users. Letterman would interview you.
• The interface is not perfect but remarkably successful. I would like to see additional hyper jump arrows that move me faster down the street. The white bars that represent directions along the streets are perhaps longer than they need to be and look a bit disorienting when the Mini is weaving** around traffic or approaching a hill.
• And it would be nice to be able to drag the display around the map so we can see the stuff under it. Having said that, the little context overview window at the lower right is very useful and you can drag the rectangle around there.
• Another thing that I do like is the cross blending between views which makes for a smoother 'ride'. They also smooth things out with some clever interpolation tricks when you rotate the view.

Seeing this brand new technology from the Almighty Google is a real kicker for the imagination. The possibilities for this seem endless.

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Footnotes

* My source inside Google says that they use a car rigged with half a dozen cameras and a heckuva power supply to keep the computer running while they sweep the streets. I told my friend that I could imagine "Google-Cabs" of the future scurrying around city streets everywhere doing database updates. Hmmm. (back to story)

** Try going west along the Embarcadero from the initial spot. We weave a little as we go. (back to story)