Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include all of the country's major and minor cities, as well as cities and rural areas of many other countries worldwide. Streets with Street View imagery available are shown as blue lines on Google Maps.
Google Street View displays interactively panoramas of stitched VR photographs. Most photography is done by car, but some is done by tricycle, camel, boat, snowmobile, underwater apparatus, and on foot.
History and features
Street View had its inception in 2001 with the Stanford CityBlock Project, a Google-sponsored Stanford University research project. The project ended in June 2006, and its technology was folded into StreetView. 2007: Launched on May 25 in the United States using Immersive Media Company technology. 2008: In May Google announces that it was testing face-blurring technology on its photos of the busy streets of Manhattan. The technology uses a computer algorithm to search Google's image database for faces and blurs them. Street View was integrated into Google Earth 4.3, the Maps application on the Apple iPhone, and the Maps application for S60 3rd Edition. In November, the drag and drop Pegman icon is introduced as the primary user interface element for connecting from Maps' 2D view into Street View's 3D view. When Pegman is dropped onto a particular set of coordinates in Google Maps for which Street View data is available, Street View opens and takes over the whole map window. 2009: Introduction of a full-screen option. Smart Navigation was introduced allowing users to navigate around the panoramas by double-clicking with their cursor on any place or object they want to see. May 2011: Indoor views of businesses (Google Business Photos) were announced. After the pilot phase of several months, the project was rolled out in earnest in autumn. November 2012: With the release of Android 4.2, Google invites users to contribute panoramas of their own using supported devices. Google highlights user-contributed panoramas with blue circle icons on Maps. The company also created a website to highlight places in the world where one can find them. 2013: Business interior views are shown as small orange circles. Businesses such as shops, cafés and other premises can pay a photographer to take panoramic images of the interior of their premises which are then included in Street View. Google sets up a program to let third parties borrow the Street View Trekker (a backpack-mounted camera) and contribute imagery to Google Maps. 2014: Street-level imagery from the past can now be seen, if available for a given street view. 2015: A partnership was announced between Street View and the environmental monitoring company Aclima. Cars began carrying sensors to detect pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and particulates. In October, support for Google Cardboard was announced, allowing users to utilize Street View in 360-degree virtual reality. 2017: Imagery inside the International Space Station is added to Street View. 2017: Starting in August, Google allows users to create their own Street View-like blue paths, for the connected photospheres that are sufficiently close to one another. 2017: On September 5, Google announced that they are improving the quality of the street view panoramic photo, revamping its mapping vehicles with all-new high-resolution camera systems and artificial intelligence to capture even better imagery. The new Google cars have been seen in various American cities since March 2017, as well as in Japan since August. The first images taken with the new generation of cameras were available online on September 13. October 2017: The makers of the Insta360 Pro announce the certification of the first "Street View auto ready" camera for US$3500; it uses six lenses for a 360º view and comes with Stitcher software. In addition to purchase, the camera rig is also available to qualified entities as part of the Google loaner program, with 50 cameras available to loan, making possible Google Street View imagery coverage of more places that Google might not visit, and to entities for whom a purchase is impractical or impossible. 2018: Google Japan now offers the street view from a dog's perspective. August 2018: Street View covers two offshore gas-extraction platforms in the North Sea. On December 3, 2020, Google announced that users could contribute to Street View by capturing video using their AR-supported phones using the Street View app.