Google Street View Tidbits

The French blog Zorgloob found some interesting information about Google Street View, the project that wants to capture street level photographs all over the world.

After launching Street View in the US, Australia, Japan and France, Google will expand the coverage to Spain tomorrow. The next countries will be Italy, Germany, UK and the Netherlands. Google has just started to capture photos in the Eastern Europe, as you can see from these images taken in Bucharest, Romania.

(Licensed as Creative Commons by Catalin Istratoiu.)

Zorgloob estimates that Google's cameras take 8 simultaneous photos every 5 meters and each compressed photo has about 1 MB. That means each kilometer adds 1.6 GB of data.

And when Street View cars aren't allowed, Google uses tricycles. Capturing street-level imagery is a big effort (Zorgloob says that Google Street View costs 500 million Euro) and it may seem that the benefits aren't very significant, but Street View makes Google Maps more valuable and it's a great opportunity to connect Google with the real world.

Zorgloob's original article (in French) | English translation