When Google launched their new Street View overlay for its mapping service the other day, I thought “how cool!” And spent a happy breakfast-time wandering the streets of San Francisco, picking out the place in Cow Hollow we stayed back in March, the cafe in North Beach that served the city’s best latte and the view from Cliff House, which we never quite made it to during our spring visit.
It’s such an obvious and smart enhancement - forget sightseeing: a panoramic view makes giving directions a doddle, not to mention scoping out new neighbourhoods to see if you could fancy living there.
But it was only a couple of days later that the real value of the service revealed itself - peoplewatching.
Anyone who has ever sat in the window of a coffeeshop on the corner of abusy thoroughfare or on a bench in a city square knows exactly what I’m talking about: people are interesting to watch, and humans are nosy by nature.
Hence it was with a grin that I discovered that, like google earth before it, street view is peppered with people going about their daily life, and captured doing it forever (or until they ask to be removed from the library, presumably)*.
Here are a few I found earlier. I like how the all-seeing Google eye has captured them in brief moments of humanity - not just jogging or waiting to cross the street, but interacting, living, being..
Have you met any others on your street-level travels?
Actually, I wonder if they - or someone else - is bringing the same thing to the streets of the UK: the other day in central London I passed a car with a weird, round 360 mounted swivelling thing on its roof.
Or, I should say, it passed me.
Gulp.
* of course, the other angle on all of this is that it raises all sorts of questions about privacy and identity (especially, tinfoil hat lovers, when combined with Google’s also-new face image search [link coming later: I’m writing this on my Blackberry on a train to Shropshire]
That car with a 360 swivel camera was probably a local council/police enforcement car. They use them to check parking. The Police use them to automatically scan number plates, check them on the database, and then pull over drivers who’s plates are flagged. They were doing it on the bit between Olympia and Kensington High Street on Thursday afternoon, and the BBC reported them catching loads of people when the did it in the East End last week.
That is so cool! I’m going to be playing with it for hours now :D
the google photos have a wonderfully timeless feel to them, partly due to being occasionally over-exposed and blurred, which make them look a bit ’70s.
The ones with loads of people in them look like the (digitally manipulated) pictures by Jeff Wall:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/image/roomguide/rm3_milk_lrg.jpg