In six months or so, remember to check Google Street View for the corner of Smithe and Homer in Vancouver. You were having lunch at Subeez, out on the patio, and the Google camera car drove past. You hastily snapped a poor photo as it waited up the block at a red light:
You were wearing a (very manly) pink shirt and having the chicken and brie sandwich. Maybe you’ll see yourself, with your face all blurred.
It would have been cool to see the Street View car, but given the choice, I’d rather have the chicken and brie sandwich. If memory serves, it’s quite tasty.
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Why do they not promote its path so people can do ridiculous things? That would be fun, fun, fun.
I wish you were dressed like Waldo.
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Interesting. Wasn’t there a big deal being made about how Google Streetview was not compatible with Canadian privacy laws? Has that been sorted out?
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I guess I’m a little shocked that Vancouver hadn’t been googled yet.
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Good catch.
Here’s a collection of pairs of photos - both the pics of the cars and the StreetView pics of the photographer.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/24/surveillance_feedback_loop/page2.html
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Oooh, you got a GOOD corner, lots of people will be looking at that one. I was biking across Union and Heatley, so if I’m lucky it’ll have caught me coming through the intersection. I was wishing I had my ARCTIC banner along.
Which got me wondering, what’s to stop someone from following it along, getting in a shot every block? Would they just come back later and reshoot it if somebody was doing something too silly? What’s the tolerance for bizarre and/or repetitive behaviour in Street View?
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darren Reply:
April 29th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Indeed, I had an idea to crowd-source tracking the car around Vancouver. Then we could, as you describe, chase, or hold up crazy banners on the sidewalk and so forth.
The tolerance must be reasonably high, as there’s an infamous set of photos where the car goes under a low bridge, and the camera mount gets knocked over.
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[...] the other day when he noticed something quite remarkable. The Google Street View car drove by and took his picture. It takes about six months for Google to process all that data, so Darren wrote a note to his [...]
[...] six months ago, I wrote about seeing the Google Street View camera car drive past. When Google’s street-level photo feature [...]
