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).
Billy Rennekamp made this looping video of a highway clover from Google Streetview. If you’re curious, the highway here is I-265 to I-71 (and back again…and so on and so forth). [via]
If you haven’t test-driven the new Google Maps yet, you should. Its improved interface and navigation controls is a big jump from where it used to be. It feels a bit less cumbersome to explore via Street View now.
I wasn’t aware that Google’s servers could be overloaded. I always thought that they were impenetrable because they were simply Google. I guess I’ll have to wait a bit before I see the image of the house on fire.
Yesterday, Google officially announced an expansion of their Street View initiative that now covers a good portion of the continental United States. In about 12 months, the team at Google Maps have successfully taken images of major streets and roads in many major cities across America. The image above shows Street View coverage before and after yesterday’s announcement. As you can see, just about the entire southeast portion of the US is finished (that in itself is impressive) and only sections of the Midwest are left out of the Street View picture.
I wonder how much longer until they can really say that they’ve traveled the entire US.
