Get Today's Headlines on your cellGoogle to activate Dallas Street View at 9 a.m.
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I was right; the folks at Google Maps are preparing to launch their Street View feature in Dallas -- and seven other cities. The feature should start working at 9 a.m. central time today and cover many of the central areas in Dallas, Ft. Worth, Boston, Indianapolis, Providence, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Google launched Street View in five cities this May. The company then added four more cities in August and another six in October. Google eventually plans to offer the feature across a large percentage of this country and in major metropolitan areas around the world. Even as Google has been picking up speed, the company has also been improving image quality. I found some of the earliest images hard to use, mostly because glare from the sun washed out many of the details that are supposed to make Street View pictures useful, but that may not be a problem in Dallas... Stephen Chau, the product manager for Street View, says this most recent set of images is far better than any that have preceded it. Indeed, Mr. Chau thinks they will be plenty good enough for people to scout out locations before they actually go to them. "Say you're trying out a new restaurant and you want to know if there's a lot of on-street parking nearby. Street View lets you do that," he told me. "It also lets you look up things you could never find with traditional searches. Say you remember passing by a cool-looking restaurant but you can't remember the name or the exact location. You'd never find it in the phone book or even on a traditional Google search but you could easily find it with Street View." That said, it would be far more valuable to fly around 3d models of the world than it is to look at 2d photos through a browser, which is why I asked Mr. Chau if all the pictures taken for Street View would eventually find their way into such models. Google has tried to incorporate models into its Google Earth tool, but additions have come slowly. The huge number of images collected by Street View would provide a valuable addition, right? "No comment," said Mr. Chau. |
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Comments
Posted by Jim Rossman @ 9:01 AM Tue, Dec 11, 2007
I'm happy to see street level views of everything inside LBJ and Loop 820 in Dallas/Ft Worth plus everything north to Frisco.
Nice job.
My car is parked in my driveway on our street. Photos were taken earlier this summer before we had our trees trimmed.
Here's a fun thing to do, when you're in street view, drag your mouse down to reveal the vehicle used to take the photos.