A robust, timely census is vital to democracy. Censuses sketch the changing face of our nation by charting both political and demographic shifts, including changes in wealth and neighborhood transitions. Most crucially, they influence how resources and political power are doled out: Cities use census data to set…
A crane left parked in front of a sugar factory for months in Baltimore, Maryland, prevented photographer Paul Frederiksen from getting the exact shot he wanted. He had assumed that using Photoshop to erase the obtrusive crane was all but impossible, until Denyer, a UK-based photographer, performed a photo-editing…
Sometime between your marine biologist and professional ninja phases, you probably dreamed of being an astronaut as a kid. But have you seen all the work that goes into actually becoming one? Save yourself years of G-force training and wearing onesies and just shortcut your way onto the International Space Station,…
Imagine my excitement when I saw the Google blog post about a new Street View adventure that took you inside of a volcano. I’ve always wanted to jump inside of a volcano! Then can you imagine my disappointment when I learned that the new Volcano View only lets you peer into the lava from the safety of the volcano’s…
After gazing long into the abyss that is our daily lives, Google finally found the abyss gazing back this week when a Reddit user snapped a picture of a Street View car following “an unexpected error.”
We’ve all had bad days at work, but most of us can just soldier through and move on. Unfortunately for Joshua Justice, Google Street View will never let him forget one particularly terrible shift.
A 30-year-old Oakland man was arrested early Thursday morning for allegedly attacking Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California with Molotov cocktails.
Earlier today, security researcher Matt Blaze tweeted out this photo of what’s allegedly a Pennsylvania State Police SUV. It looks like it’s outfitted with a license plate reader (see those cameras on the top?). Blaze contends that not only is this a police vehicle, but it’s disguised as a Google Street View truck.…
Google’s all-seeing cameras have seen a lot more than just the streets: scary mountains, underwater gardens, and Venetian canals have all been visited before, and with the help of an elite team of mountaineers, Google can take you all around Mont Blanc, the 15,777-ft high point of Europe.
Everyone loves a good before/after image, whether it’s a house flip or the makeover montage from Clueless. A group of Brazilian urbanists are expanding the genre to include public space transformations—as documented by Street View.
We have the technology, and the time is now: We can roam alleyways from a cat’s POV.
Street View has always been a separate file on your Android device — it even gets its own Play Store listing — but up until now, you got to it through the Maps app.
Apart from the Running of the Bulls in San Fermin, Spaniards enjoy some other wild festivals from time to time. One of them is called “La Tomatina.” Once a year, locals in the small village of Buñol engage in a massive battle with 150 tons of tomatoes as their only weapon of choice. Doesn’t seem like the best day to…
It seems like every week, Google drags its Street View cameras up another mountain (or across another monster-infested lake). The key to recording those inaccessible places? The Trekker, a custom-built 360-degree camera mated to a backpack, which turns mere humans into living, breathing Google data-capture machines.
To celebrate World Oceans Day on June 8, Google has released a bunch of gorgeous new images of ocean life as part of its Street View feature in Maps. Now you can contemplate what it means, metaphorically, when your mapping app suggests that oceans are just as important as cities.
Google Street View has taken us to the ends of the world and back (in time). But now, its taking us where no Street View camera has taken us before—into the Arabian desert on the back of a 10-year-old camel named Raffia.
Google's security algorithms are designed to blur out any identifiable faces that show up in Street View. This technology was originally developed to anonymize people, but it's been known to tag its fair share of billboards, murals, and – wouldn't you know it – religious effigies.
Imagine you're dropped in the middle of an unknown city and you need to find a restaurant in a safe area using only the visual cues around you. Sounds hard, right? Well, researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that can do it — and it consistently outperforms humans.
Ever notice how all the faces are blurred in Google Street View photos? That happens thanks to a privacy-enabling robot. But it's not a perfect robot. The Google Street View robot not only blurs the faces of humans but also of statues, despite the fact that statues have no notion of privacy. Makes you think, doesn't…
When Google launched its Street View experiment in 2007, it was an ambitious plan. It promised to give us all a more familiar POV of the world rather than Google Maps' familiar bird's eye vantage point, and six years later we can travel to thousands of locales, scale Mount Everest or meander down Diagon Alley.
