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Not content with just photographing the tops of our houses via satellite, Google now wants to snap our front doors. The Street View service, currently being trialled in a selection of major US cities, lets people ‘walk’ down a road, looking at thousands of photographs seamlessly stitched together to represent the real thing.

“We have trucks that are driving around city streets with cameras on top taking these images… it’s essentially taking 360 degrees pictures every so often, and there’s some scanning equipment on the thing too, to figure out exactly, down to the inch, where the truck is and where the camera is pointing,” says Lars Rasmussen, Google’s Senior Engineer on Google Maps.

The Google Street View vans coast along designated roads, snapping photos in all directions, and nothing down the precise locations via GPS co-ordinates. Each photograph is tagged with the location of the van and which direction it was facing when taken, and then stitched together with its adjacent photos to provide a single, smooth panoramic photograph. Anyone visiting Google Maps only needs to point to a particular road and hit Street View.

The idea of driving vans down streets and snapping photos in all directions isn’t unique to Google - in fact, Google is behind the times. Microsoft’s Live.com Maps service has offered a similar feature for over a year in two limited sections of Seattle and San Francisco, but Microsoft is yet to roll it out into areas. Amazon’s A-9 search engine also announced a similar service more than two years ago, before closing it down completely. A small start-up. EverySpace, also has a street level map of a small area, but considering it uses Google’s own 2D maps for positioning, its future would seem limited.

Where Google is succeeding, however, is in two main areas: it’s being rolled out across many large metropolitan areas and being integrated into Google’s already successful Google Maps service. But if there’s one sure mark of success, it’s controversy - and Street View is literally getting up some people’s noses.

Privacy woes
When Google Maps showed off its high resolution aerial and satellite photography, some questioned whether they wanted others to see what was in their back yard. With Street View, photographs show much more detail, like the number on a letterbox or individual faces. And a bit sarcastic where people have been identified leaving adult book shops and strip clubs, while others have zoomed in on license plate numbers to track down culprits that may have caused an accident.

What Google is doing is within the boundaries of the law as it currently stands. There is currently no law, in Australia or the US, which prevents anyone from taking a photograph of anyone else’s house while they are on public property, and putting that photograph online.

“Our original intention was to move from this view of Internet mapping, that was about looking up an address or getting driving directions, to a view where you can get everything where a location is relevant through a map or a Mapplet,” Rasmussen added.

To see Street View in action
Go to Google Maps and head to San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver or Miami. Roads with Street View enabled are highlighted in blue.

What do you think? Is Street View a useful tool, or has Google crossed the line?

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