http://tinyurl.com/67k3sk
Next time!
Here's some more info on the camera system the Google Gnomes used to capture these images.
"For the past seven months, Kevin Nanzer has been on the road almost nonstop, living in and out of motel rooms and corporate apartments. He’s crisscrossed the country, living for weeks at a time in cities like Austin, Texas, Oklahoma City, Okla., Raleigh, N.C., and Albany, N.Y.
Nanzer, 23, is a geoimmersive data producer for Immersive Media, a Canadian company that specializes in the fast-growing world of “spherical video”—aka mapping the world for Google and beyond. For 5 hours each day (the most he can film because of the sun’s angle to the Earth), Nanzer and a co-worker drive anywhere from 80 to 200 miles through a major city, capturing video and location data of every single street, bridge and highway.
“By the end, you’ll get to know the city better than the one you grew up in,” he says. “You can call me if you’re lost in Oklahoma City, and I can tell you how to get somewhere. I know all the streets.”
On this particular day, I’m sitting shotgun with Nanzer for a sneak peak at the 360-degree, roof-mounted data collection for topography 2.0. He typically wouldn’t shoot footage on a rainy Manhattan day like this, because raindrops obscure the camera’s 11 image-sensing lenses. And while the several blocks we covered looked as crystal clear as they do on the Google site (click here to play around with our test-drive footage), I’m not sure I could have taken it much longer anyway: Immersive uses a Volkswagen Beetle because of its small footprint and low ride, but that makes for one hell of a cramped trip. With all the equipment in the backseat, this tricked-out Bug fits just two people up front, where a laptop already takes up most of the dash on the passenger side, leaving me barely enough room to turn on and hold my camcorder steady."
Continued at:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...y/4232286.html