The camera behind Google's Street View

Daniel Terdiman, CNET.com | Jun 13, 2007

If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that US$25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck it took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.

Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.

What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company shot its own, higher-resolution images. But it must have been something similar, though we know from this image that Google used a van, while Immersive Media seems to have used a Volkswagen New Beetle.

Enjoy. Oh, and did I say $25 billion time suck? By now, it's up to $26 billion. And counting.

Via CNET Crave

Filed under: Digital Cameras
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Mapper101

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Mapper101 says...
That camera can take some pretty fantastic pictures. Take a look at this huge archive of Google Street View pictures:

streetviewgallery.corank.com

Jun 14, 2007 23:19