I just discovered this the other day when I was trying to get directions to go somewhere. I was on google maps and had just typed in an address in London. I clicked on the location, then it asked me for street view. I had no idea what it was so i decided to click on it. To my huge surprise, I was looking at a street view of the store I was looking for. What surprised me even more was that this was not an assortment of pictures, as they have on Google Earth, but it was an actual flowing view of the street, as if i was there in the middle of the road. I first thought Google Earth was the most amazing thing ever. On Google Earth I could travel the world from the comfort of my desk chair. Yet I was only able to see an areal view of the place, I could never actually see the buildings and other things on the street level. Yet now, I can literally go anywhere and see anything from the street. Google Street View is a function of Google Maps. When you type in an address in google maps you can sometimes have the option of seeing street view. You can then view the map on satellite mode which allows you to better see the actual world. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks to Google Street View. One of them is that you can not see every street view in the world. The way Google gets its Street Views is that they send a car down a road with a bunch of cameras on the top. These cameras take high resolution videos of the street. The car drives down every road it can and records the "Street View" of a place. Obviously these videos are taken during the day. I actually encountered one of these cars one day when my and I were walking back from lunch at Abbey Road. The car was a regular car, yet it had a ridiculous amount of cameras on the roof of it, pointing in every direction. At the time I had no idea what it was for, yet the other day I finally figured it out. Unlike Google Earth, I can't really see any security risks that Google Street View could cause. I mean, they only take pictures of public roads, roads that anyone can walk on. So, unlike Google Earth, they don't show images of secret army bases in the desert. Google Street View is really cool and I am sure I will use it a lot in the future, not only to find directions but also to explore the world.
I hadn't thought of using Google Street View to explore random places around the world that I might not otherwise be able to see. I have used Google Street View in the past, though. Once, when one of my friends who lives in the States moved, I typed in her address and took at look at her street and what her house looks like because I otherwise wouldn't be able to see it until the summer. There is no more need to send a "save the address" card with a photo of your house, when you can use Google Street View. The cameras that they use must be very high quality in order to be able to stop them as photos that come up on Google Street View. I had no idea video cameras were used rather than cameras that just have really high frames per second (take the photos really fast). Though, I suppose a video camera makes much more sense.
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