Google Street View Camera goes Mountaineering and Surfing

Last week we had a look at miniature Street View, where the street view cameras got tiny and toured the world’s largest model railway. For pictures of the camera they used on that project see this article.

Google Street View has also recently gone mountaineering. They have captured Street View on Mont Blanc in the Alps. Read more about it on the Google Lat Long blog.

In addition to a track going all the way up Mont Blanc, there are some individual shots of people climbing on rock or ice.

Google Earth Street View does not display well directly down or directly up. In this image the climber is, unfortunately, in the worst spot of the image.

The same image looks much better in Google Maps

Find the above locations in Google Earth with this KML file. It is not easy to see what other locations are available in Google Earth, but if you open the above placemarks and then just click randomly on the image you will discover other scenic locations.

In preparation for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Google has been gathering Street View in the area, including sending the trekker for a ride on a ‘Stand Up Paddling’ board. See a picture here. The imagery is not yet in Google Maps or Google Earth.

Street View has been as far afield as Greenland and as we have seen above, up mountains and on the ocean. It has been under the ocean and in forest canopies. So where next? My guess would be that with the advent of cheap drones the next big thing will be Street View in the air. For fairly flat terrain it doesn’t really make sense to have 360 degree photos from the air and aerial photography would be the norm. This would be indistinguishable from current aerial photography other than being higher resolution. Frank’s kite photography is an example of this. However, for cities and forests 360 degree photos would make sense as we saw for the Amazon zip-line photography.