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View Larger MapLook up and you'll see the splattering above the house on Milner Road. [Google Maps via Geekologie]

Grotere kaart weergeven"Oh hey look, it's such a nice day for a drive in Amersfoort. Just driving along, following a fire truck through these quaint streets. La-la-la-la-la. Oh... little old lady on a bike, watch where you're going. LITTLE OLD LADY! Watch out for the fire truck it's about to hit [TRANSCRIPT TERMINATED. GOOGLE DOES NOT HAVE RECORD OF A FIRE TRUCK HITTING AN OLD LADY. INQUIRY INTO THE INCIDENT WILL RESULT IN "UNFORTUNATE OCCURRENCES"]

Grotere kaart weergeven

Microsoft engineers and researchers are attempting to one-up Google Maps by creating route animations with the abundance of panoramic street-view photography so you can experience your trip before you drive it. It's called Videomap and it's quite clever.

The main issue with representing the trip before you make it is, unless you're traveling within a mile of your house, the time it would take to watch the trip on your computer is too long to be useful. Conversely, if you were to speed the entire trip up it would be nonsense. The software bridges this gap by speeding up and slowing down the video based on landmarks and turns.

Even better, since it's a panoramic camera, they're able to slow down the video and crop it so the driver looks around the turn as if they were driving themselves. It can also turn to show obvious landmarks along the journey and zoom-out when the data is less important (i.e. when traveling along an extended area with few turns or landmarks, like a highway)

Limited studies show the technique results in increased accuracy and reduced time spent consulting maps, which is good, though the limitation of this technique appears to be the increasing accessibility of GPS when you travel. For this reason, the system seems better matched to waking, biking and transportation that takes places within a certain time-compressed zone than driving.

Individuals with difficulty grasping spatial data in map form tend to utilize landmarks in determining their travel and a system like this seems suited to serving their needs. It's also fun to watch. Just imagine being able to reminisce about your old hometown by taking a quick virtual drive down Main Street to see what shops and restaurants may have changed. Sounds pretty cool to us.

[Microsoft via Technology Review via Jason_Pointin</a]

You'll need a laptop, some open-source software, and some cleverness. Thankfully, you won't have to be as clever as Ragsdale, who tested his device by first walking around holding it over his head and then by mounting it on his Jeep and driving around the town of West Point. Ragsdale says he'll eventually get the device down to helmet or headband size, allowing you to document your hikes in great detail. Very, very cool. So get cracking out there, everyone. [Spectrum via Wired]

Click next to travel through the world of poor drivers.

Where: Roncq, France
What:A Renault meets a pole.
Why It's So Confusing: This French hatchback meets with what we're assuming is a pole before landing on the median. Why does it take nine policemen to deal with what looks like a one-car accident? Conveniently, this occurred near a car dealership so the driver can easily upgrade.

Where: Provo, Utah
What: A Semi-Truck overturned
Why It's So Confusing: This appears to be right in the middle of nowhere. Was there a windstorm? Did someone run this off the road?

Where: Escondido, California
What: This Volvo V70 runs smack dab into this pole.
Why It's So Confusing: The accident itself is fairly normal, but what makes this accident so interesting is that the police staged a good 40+ cones to direct traffic out of a one-car wreck. Bored, guys?

Where: San Antonio, Texas
What: Toyota Tundra in a garage
Why It's So Confusing Perhaps the worst parking job in recent memory, and after all that work to get the portico setup. This is why we can't have nice things.

Where: Loire, France
What: A couple crazy French cars again.
Why It's So Confusing: This looks like the classic t-bone at first glance, until you realize there's no other intersection. But even more interesting is the way these cars crumble. Russian steel much?

Where: Minneapolis, MN
What: Mercedes E-Class Into A Tree
Why It's So Confusing: What would possibly have motivated this Mercedes driver to run into this tree on a cozy side street? Does it have to do with the fact that the car is full of crap?

Where: Austin, Texas
What: Plymouth, Acclaim
Why It's So Confusing: Who knew any of the AA-bodied Mopar's survived? This one probably crashed into the side of the black F-150 with giant rims. Either way, no one walked away from this one happy.

Where: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
What: A Honda Accord Coupe And A Ford Windstar
Why It's So Confusing: What made Milwaukee famous? Why, Accord coupes crashing dead on into family wagons.

Where: Central Shasta, California
What: Jeep Grand Cherokee
Why It's So Confusing: We've looked at this a few different ways and have no idea what this truck hit or why the Google team blurred out some of the ground next to the driver... unless he tossed up his lunch.

Where: Barbera del Valles, Spain
What: A subcompact and a work truck
Why It's So Confusing: It looks like this woman was so excited by the prospect of seeing a Google Street View van she backed up straight into this work truck. Oops.

For more Street View crashes check out Street View Gallery.

The 2-minute short, produced by Google’s Japanese subsidiary, focuses on a pet peeve common in Europe and apparently in Japan as well: the freaking out over published photographs of license plates. Google employs algorithms and humans to blur them out in European and Japanese cities depicted on Street View.

As you can see if you watch the video, this sometimes entails burning the midnight oil. Beware: the background music will stick in your head for the rest of the day.

Monopoly City Streets is SimCity meets Monopoly meets Risk and it will be one of the more interesting, and time-consuming things to come out of Google in a while. The game uses the Google Maps layouts as the board and a whole host of new Monopoly buildings to build your real estate empire with. Even though we found Monopoly exceedingly tedious as youngsters, this game sounds incredibly cool. Perhaps it's the aspect of building upon actual cities that makes it so interesting. In any case, the initial release will happen tomorrow, and will no-doubt be the talk of the tubes for a while.

And think of the possible side-effects, maybe some genius will come up with a workable game plan to fix Detroit proper (hey it could happen). [Mashable]

As usual, no matter the competition, the Google Street View car's always whipping around the track in the middle of the pack. Of course they're either all going really slow or that heavy duty F-Series is going really fast.

Want to see the track run yourself? Click here.

(Hat tip to Staircar!)

[via Google]

After all, I live in Alameda, just a few blocks from the easily identifiable neighborhood in the southeastern corner of the island in which so many of Bechtle's paintings are set, so all I had to do was perform a bit of detective work and a couple miles of walking. Not so for relentless French artist Philippe Agostini, who appears to have invested hundreds of hours of Google Street View time to locate the settings of several of Bechtle's best works.

Because of my fascination with Bechtle's work, my posts show up pretty high in search results for the painter's name, and so Mr. Agostini decided to contact me. My French is nonexistent- pretty much limited to transmission automatique- and Mr. Agostini's English has its limitations, but eventually he was able to make it clear that he wanted me to get him some photos of the setting for Bechtle's 2006 painting Six Houses On Mound Street. So I did.

Next thing I know, he's got what appears to be a heavy-duty analysis of Bechtle's work on his website, complete with cryptic diagrams.
[Appeau Vert]

We know the Transit Connect has a disproportionately large amount of cargo space for its size, we know it's nimble and can get into even the darkest alleys, we also know it can be had, as is this case, in windowless delivery form, but somehow we don't think this was what Ford had in mind when they designed the little bugger. If you're bored, and not at work, swing around back and check out the bumper, it seems like the cover might have been torn off. [Google Sight Seeing]

Looking at Street View through the monitor is one thing, but since the pictures are taken in a 360 degree format, what's preventing them from being viewed that way? Enter the Google Street View Holodeck, a series of vertically oriented LCD screens mounted in a circular room in the Googleplex and programmed to display scenes from around Mountain View in a pseudo-holodeck-like experience. "Drive" down the road and all the screens move appropriately. Pretty neat, we'll admit, but we're surprised Google didn't use a projection dome and multiple overlapped projectors for a more realistic experience. Wonder if you have to wear your Star Trek uniform when you go in there? [Search Engine Land]

You can relive the moment in Street View or via Valleywag's video, embedded here, but you'll have to furnish your own sound effects. I'd like to suggest an Urkelian "Did I do thaaaaat?", if I may. [Reddit via Valleywag]

UPDATE: Some commenters have plausibly suggested that the camera could have just been deliberately lowered and accidentally left on, creating this mind-melting set of image data. This explanation is reasonable, but more to the point it's much less fun.

A local photographer in the village of Wool in Dorset spotted the Google car mapping the area and decided to capture a few shots of it. The driver of the car was not pleased:

The Google driver then proceeded to shout at the photographer and said: "Don't you take pictures of me, mate." He then asked the photographer to blur his face out of the pictures as Google does in its Street View images.

HA! The photographer managed to get several shots of the vehicle without having to resort to fistcuffs, but we will be sure to keep an eye on the powderkeg that is Google Street View's UK adventure. [Telegraph]

A spate of burglaries in the Buckinghamshire village of Broughton caused residents to spring into action when the Google Street View car puttered towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof. The villagers formed a human chain to stop it, haranguing the driver about "invasion of privacy" fears, claiming a belief that the images Google planned to put online could be used by burglars.

As police made their way to the stand-off, the Google car yielded to the villagers and for now, Broughton remains off the internet search engine's mapping service.

So while there's yet to be found any connection between a rise in burglaries and the Google Street View service, it didn't stop this small UK village from extreme NIMBY-ism. (Hat tip to engineerd!)

[via Times Online]

An especially awesome development would be to automate this, requiring only a starting and a finishing point. Suddenly, the nightly rituals of Google Mapsing great drives or pleasant strolls would be even more fun.

Video Credit: joelaz/Flickr via Gizmodo