I don’t remember reading an official post about it from Google, so who knows how long this new Street View imagery has been up, but apparently Google has launched brand-new Street View imagery in certain locations all throughout Manhattan. The new imagery is ultra-sharp compared to what was being used previously, and now there’s actually a reason to use Google’s zooming feature while browsing in Street View mode.
The imagery is sharper and generally higher resolution and there appears to be a bigger range in accepted exposures (as you can see in the image above which shows actual clouds in the sky rather than just a blown out white space like it was previously). It looks like Google Maps covered most of the avenues in NYC first before going down the individual streets, but so far, a good portion of the island is switched over to the new imagery making the Google Maps browsing experience overall more satisfying (and creepy…maybe).
UPDATE: Oh ok, it looks like I just overlooked this Google announcement from Thursday.
