Samantha Rose Hunt09 June 2009, 12:45 PM
Google has given its Street View system a major update with a system that lets you "walk" roads in 3D without having to click-click-click to advance a screen at a time.
Google has announced that its Google Maps Street View service, which displays images of both business and residential areas at street level, will now be offering a new method of navigation which allows for more freedom of movement.
"Today, we are really excited to introduce a new mode of navigation which liberates you from the road arrows and gets you where you want to go in just a few clicks," Google computer vision engineer Daniel Filip explained in a post on the Google Lat Long blog.
"You can now use Street View's smart navigation to travel to a new place just by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see."
For example, this view of APC's headquarters at 66 Goulburn St, Sydney, demonstrates the new navigation system well. As you move the mouse around, the circular "pancake" on the ground lets you travel immediately down the road (the smaller the pancake gets in the distance, the further you'll travel in one click), while if you move the pancake onto a building, it becomes a square that lets you zoom in closer on the building.
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Google says the navigation improvement was made possible because when it was taking its panoramic photos of streets, it was also taking detailed laser measurements of distances in all directions, allowing it to generate a three dimensional space, now with added pancake!