Streetview : Locating Awesomeness

Street View is a feature available in Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile that allows users to explore the world through 360-degree panoramic street-level imagery. Usually, Google uses a car to collect Street View imagery, but often few places are not accessible with a car. For such places and smaller paths and unique terrain, they use three specially designed imagery collection platforms: the Trike, the Trolley, and the Snowmobile.


Street View imagery is gathered by cars, or other platforms, equipped with advanced imaging technology. Once the photographs have been taken, they go through computer processing to make them ready for showing on Google Maps. All the individual photos that have been collected by the cameras are taken and "stitched" together to make the 360-degree panorama that you see on Google Maps. Then cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology is applied to help ensure that passers-by in the photographs can't be identified.

It uses an 11-lens camera called Dodeca 2360 that captures an immensely large surface area of images at a very high resolution. This camera is mounted on top of a moving vehicle that both records video and geodata simultaneously. What you see on Street View are image stills from that video, which is how you're able to get a new shot from nearly every point on a recorded route.

At the beginning, Google used three types of cameras mounted on SUVs packed with computers for image processing to take Street View Photographs. The 1st,2nd and 3rd Generation cameras cause shadows and other minor aberrations because of which the images clicked using them are slowly being phased out by those clicked using the near-HD 4th Generation cameras.

In October 2008, Google introduced the Street View Trike, a pedal tricycle with a 4th generation camera mounted to take images where cars cannot reach, including footpaths and dirt tracks. The 250-pound, 9-foot long tricycles are piloted by athletes. All Street View images taken now will be taken with the 4th generation Street View cameras. In February 2010, Google introduced the Street View Snowmobile, a snowmobile with a 4th generation camera mounted to take images in preparation for the winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

To create such a luxury for navigating users, Google has created such an intricate piece of art, that is Streetview.  Simply put, the level of detail and proportionate work that goes into the tech behind Street View is very resource-intensive. According to various outlets, Google are typically on the road capturing imagery and data 46 hours a day using multiple vehicles with the mounted cameras.