Google Street View

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• Swiss Alps

Google Street View adds Swiss Alps & Sochi Formula 1 track coverage

Zac Hall Oct 3 2014 - 8:27 am PT

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Street View continues to be one of the most robust features with Google Maps, and the team has recently added some remarkable locations to the Street View collection. Shared today on the company’s Europe blog, Google Street view has added new imagery of scenes from around the Swiss Alps in Switzerland:

Together with the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) and the Swiss Tourism Board (MySwitzerland.com), we launched a contest called “Queen of the Alps.” High in the Swiss Alps, far from any road or other buildings, are picturesque huts used to spend a night by farmers and vacationers.

It often takes a full day hike to reach these out of the way huts. We ran online vote to find the favorite Swiss hut, promising to film the choice for Street View. The Swiss Alpine Club’s Lauteraarhütte-SAC in the canton of Berne (region “Grimselgebiet”) won. It took our Trekkers a five hour hike up the Grimsels Hospiz to capture this exciting imagery.

The Street View film crew also toured and captured the Winter Olympic venues in Sochi, Russia, including the Sochi Formula 1 racing track:

Stroll around the Fischt stadium which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies. Walk on the Ice Palace “Iceberg” and visit the Olympic Village, where your favorite team stayed.

In particular, take a look at the new Formula 1 track in Sochi. It is located in the city’s Olympic Park and is the only Formula 1 track in Russia. From October 10-12, Russia will host its first World Championship race.

As you can see above, you can actually tour the Formula 1 racing track as if you were behind the wheel of the car. Just search the venues on Google Maps.

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• Indonesia
• Malaysia

Latest Street View imagery spans Mason & Grand Ledge, Michigan, to Argentina & Malaysia

Ben Lovejoy Sep 26 2014 - 7:17 am PT

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Google Street View cars have been busy, adding Mason and Grand Ledge in the U.S., expanding coverage of Malaysia and adding in Argentina, reports the Google Earth Blog – the Grand Ledge Opera House shown above. This follows Google adding Cambodia and Indonesia last month.

Google has already added historical Street View links to a few locations in Argentina, the dates indicating that Google has been collecting the imagery for around a year.

Google’s Street View cars are doing more than taking photos these days, the company using some of them to detect methane leaks from corroded pipes, landfill sites and other sources. The company’s more notorious form of data-collection – wifi sniffing – resulted in a $7M settlement, the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting its attempt to appeal the lawsuit.

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• Google Street View
• campus
• tour
• school

Google Maps adds Street View for 36 new university campuses in US & Canada

Jordan Kahn Aug 7 2014 - 8:21 am PT

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Google announced today that it’s added Street View imagery for a long list of new university campuses in Google Maps. The new schools, which include campuses across the U.S. and Canada, are available to explore starting today. 

Google notes that these new additions add to the hundreds of school campuses you can already explore in Google Maps. It highlighted a few of the new campuses rolling out today in its announcement including Georgetown University, University of Miami, and the University of Regina in Canada.

To see if a Street View tour of your dream school is available, search for a particular university on Google Maps and click on Pegman to enter the Street View imagery. Visit our Street View gallery for global highlights and other popular universities around the world.

• Google
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• Google Street View
• Do Not Track Policy
• Paul McCartney

After the right to be forgotten, celebrities acting on the right to be blurred …

Ben Lovejoy Jul 7 2014 - 5:30 am PT

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Amidst the ‘controversy’ of the recently-introduced ‘right to be forgotten‘ on Google, the Independent reports that celebrities and other public figures are asking Google to blur the Street View images of their homes. Musicians Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Lily Allen and Katherine Jenkins are amongst those named as having taken advantage of the Google tool to request this. Google’s Street View privacy page says that in addition to the blurring it already does automatically (including faces, some street numbers and some homes), additional blurring is done on request.

We provide easily accessible tools allowing users to request further blurring of any image that features the user, their family, their car or their home. In addition to the automatic blurring of faces and license plates, we will blur the entire car, house, or person when a user makes this request for additional blurring.

(via Gizmodo)

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• Google Street View
• Edinburgh
• Gary Kerr

Police investigate when someone reported an apparent axe-murder spotted on Google Street View

Ben Lovejoy Jun 3 2014 - 6:57 am PT

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Police in Edinburgh, Scotland, were called out to investigate when someone using Google Street View thought they’d spotted an axe-murder, reports the Independent. The series of images apparently showed someone being struck with an axe and the assailant walking away from the lifeless body on the ground.

The scene turned out to be a prank by a couple of quick-thinking mechanics who said they had 20 seconds to think of something to do when they spotted the Google car approaching.

“It was in the spur of the moment,” Dan Thompson said. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do so I threw myself on the ground and Gary [Kerr] grabbed a pick-axe handle from the garage.

“We only had about 20 seconds – it was all we could think of.”

The way that Google stitches Street View images together, which often leave visible breaks, added to the illusion, seeming to show a chopped-off hand.

The pair of jokers said that fortunately the two police officers who turned up to check it out saw the funny side.

They were already pretty certain it was a joke because one of their colleagues gets their car serviced here. They thought it was a really good laugh and in five minutes they were gone.

Certainly beats mooning or a couple getting amorous.

• Google Maps
• Google Street View
• imagery
• Grand Canyon
• Colorado River

Explore the Colorado River while you still can with Street View

Jordan Kahn Mar 13 2014 - 8:53 am PT

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdVXrVxziXc]

Senior Vice President of Conservation at American Rivers Chris Williams announced today on the Google Maps blog that the organization has partnered with Google to add high-resolution imagery of the Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon to Street View:

For 6 million years, the Colorado River has flowed through the heart of the desert southwest, its waters slowly carving out a canyon so vast it can be seen from space—yet so remote it didn’t appear on early maps of the region. It wasn’t until 1869, when John Wesley Powell led a small exploration party on a rafting trip, that the natural wonders of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon came fully into view.

Start at an iconic spot like Deer Creek Falls or North Canyon, or climb up to the Nankoweap Granaries. Geology fans will enjoy formations like Hermit Shale and Tapeats Sandstone. On your journey, look out for wildlife like big horn sheep and signs of a volcanic dam that naturally occurred centuries ago.

The project was an important one, as Google noted in its blog post, the Colorado River has long been at risk:

While you admire its grandeur, remember that the river is also at risk. One of the United States’ most important resources, the Colorado River provides drinking water for 36 million people from Denver to Los Angeles, supports a $26 billion recreation industry, and irrigates nearly 4 million acres of land that grow 15 percent of our nation’s crops. But it’s also one of the most endangered, dammed, diverted and plumbed rivers in the world, thanks to a century of management policies and practices that have promoted the use of Colorado River water at an unsustainable rate. By the time it reaches the Gulf of California in Mexico, the river is barely a trickle—a ghost of its once magnificent self. You can see evidence of the river’s decline In Street View, like the high water mark (showing 1950s driftwood on top of the rock), or sedimentation along the river’s edge down by Lake Mead.

Google has a new collection of imagery from the Colorado River here and a new webpage taking you behind the scenes of the project here.

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• Russia
• Sochi

Google expands Russian Street View coverage in run-up to Winter Olympics

Ben Lovejoy Jan 31 2014 - 6:31 am PT

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While technology hasn’t quite reached the stage of allowing us to watch the Winter Olympics from within Google Street View,  you can now take a virtual wander through the host city of Sochi. The games are scheduled to take place there from 7th to 23rd February.

Street View coverage in Russia also now includes Vladivostok, Irkutsk and Yakutsk – though you may want to put on your coat for the latter: as the city with the greatest seasonal temperature swings on Earth, the lowest recorded winter temperature was a bracing -83.9F (-64.4C).

Google also added its first imagery in Slovenia, making the central European nation the 56th country to be added to Street View.

Check out some other cool (not all of them quite so literally) places you can visit on Street View with our roundup here.