Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Street Level Views on Google


Google released a new feature today: Street level views in some locations. If you go to Google Maps and zoom into Denver, Chicago, New York, or a bunch of other cities, you'll see a button at the top for Street Level Views. Basically, you can walk down any street in downtown Denver, seeing the street trees, storefronts, with street names layed over the top of it. It's definitely worth a test drive.

Incidentally, the company that provided the imagery, which was collected while driving a truck equipped with a 12-sided video camera capturing a spherical, georeferenced viewpoint, licensed the technology to the military before this new partnership with Google. See the press release here.

Good stuff for map nerds.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Smart Shrinkage

Youngstown, Ohio (where we've done a bit of work) is dealing with a backwards, bizarro problem: trying to plan out how to best shrink the size of their city, emptying out old neighborhoods and converting them to green space.

Link

via Planetizen