Today was the debut of the greater Vancouver area to Google’s awesome Street View service. Supplementing an already fantastic Google Maps feature, Street View offers a new way to explore the city of Vancouver (and its surrounding areas) in the comfort of your own home.
First, I must commend Google on its boldness, logistics, technology, and vision (no pun intended) to get this done around the world. Imagine how many streets there are in even a medium-sized city. For Google Street View to work, their mapping cars must visit every street from beginning to end. When I think of the size of the greater Vancouver area, which is nothing compared to some of the world’s larger cities, it’s amazing what Google has done.
So now to the fun stuff. Since I was at work, I was able to play around with the service for only a bit. What I did see though was very interesting. After looking at the obvious places like my own home and my parents’ home, I started to look at places I used to work. As many of you know, I was quite fond of Black Box’s downtown location. It was there I found a few gems. Look at the screen shot below:
What appears to be just two dudes crossing W. Cordova along Howe is actually a technical director and an online producer on my team. We can thus surmise that the Google Street View car did this section of Vancouver before our June move. Click here for the actual link.
Now take a look at the dude below:
Waiting for the light to change is Gord, a world modeler I worked with on the original skate. Click here for the original link.
Has anyone else found interesting things in Google Street View for Vancouver?