By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and satellite views and allowing smooth free camera motion all the way from space to the front door of buildings and even inside. Many years ago I saw internal Google demos of dramatically improved Street View rendering, none of which ever made it to production. Google has consistently failed to recognize the value of the product and systematically underinvested in the user experience.
It makes sense they prototyped it. But putting it into production is $$$, way more expensive than current street view.
Current street view works well enough. How is a massively upgraded 3D version, that is bloated and slower to use on older devices, going to make Google more money?
It feels more like a separate product to license to architecture firms, city planners, video game studios, etc.
Or maybe you learn this helps you build a world model that would have accelerated Waymo's progression, or you sell it to robotics companies.
That's the nice thing about having a money printer and a ton of smart, curious, and driven people. You can afford to do things without a strict eye towards profit, that's reserved for tiny companies living on a razor's edge. Or consultants I guess.
I could see well-mapped street view with good services built around it, and maybe a way to pay for and schedule regular updates, being used for towns to monitor public space long term too.
I think many things could be built on a better street view, but I also don't want Google to get yet another de facto monopoly in a new domain.
Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/) has surprisingly good coverage in some places, but the experience is lacking, partly because most of the images (where I've looked) aren't 360 views.
[0] panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/
I'm rather happy Google maps exists and can't complain too much about using it for free.
Unfortunately it’s only a small subsets of major cities and the implementation feels so half-baked it could have been an AWS service.
But it’s still a cool tech demo nonetheless.
Finally there is a glimmer of hope now that Android XR is happening. There is a new version of Google Maps for Android XR that does finally have a 3D reconstruction feature for Street View, but only for building interiors. Hopefully it won't be abandoned this time!
Right and if they did you'd likely be complaining about how they ruined Street View by making it a slow bloated mess and should have left it alone.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
Since around ~2010, Google's culture has gradually transitioned from exploring, discovering and building new businesses to defending and extracting maximum value from existing businesses (eg Enshittification).
I was vividly reminded of this listening to the Acquired podcast's three episode Google arc last year. Although the hosts don't explicitly call it out, they do such a good job of exploring all the ways in which pre-2010 Google was incredibly innovative. visionary and exciting, the contrast to today is sobering.
While Google deserves credit for leading the way on early AI research pre-2010, they squandered much of their pole position because LLMs were more threat/risk to their huge legacy search business (despite being deployed under the hood). Then, only when the external threat became undeniable, did they respond - requiring a huge come-from-behind to regain most of the lead they'd lost.
People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view and directions then it would see much more usage.
There's a parallax effect in Street View on Apple Maps that separates out the layers of every image. Things like lampposts or telephone poles all rotate slightly differently to whatever is behind them.
And it's such a subtle effect that I still break my brain trying to determine whether or not I've made it up.
Imagine expending that much development time and effort for something you're not even sure is there. And somehow I still find it enviably cool.
Edit: for those who didn't know, like me, apple's maps are available at https://maps.apple.com. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have
Meanwhile they have nearly full coverage of the rest of western Europe, plus a huge amount of Canada and Mexico.
https://i.imgur.com/ZPTozti.png
This was launched in 2019. A few years ago I remember speculating that they were holding it back with the cool 3D effects to do a big push alongside Vision Pro, but that's come and gone with no significant change to Look Around.
California isn't doing bad, but outside of that they're averaging about 0.5 locations per state.
They haven't been to Nashville but they sent someone to drive to Rainbow Lake, Alberta? What gives?
I’m so glad to finally have that feature in my area. It was the one thing I missed from Google Maps which I otherwise avoid.
Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program
Antarctica is huge (1.5x the area of the US), it would be a dangerous logistical nightmare to fly the sorts of patterns you need to capture aerial imagery there, and it's almost entirely covered in non-descript ice -- what would be the value of having high-resolution imagery there?
We don't. State of the art imaging satellites are in ballpark of 20cm/px.
Here is what antarctica looks from a satellite: https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/satellite-image...
Edit: Apparently it is "Nova Map" base tile set from ArcGIS.
With the detail spec that the author describes, it reminds me that I have an identical CPU but I couldn't get my RAM to run at the advertised 5600Mhz. Hopefully there's updated BIOS so I can try did the issue again. Anyone know if I'd notice meaningful difference by flight from 3600 (what the pc reports) to 5600Mhz?
This might be one of the applications where it makes a difference.
Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.
edit: This page has some data: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Landscape-metrics-for-ro...
Southern Ontario has 4x the road density of the province average, so might be a contributing factor?
Since anyone can request a building be blurred forever, I imagine it'll just get worse.
Also, maps constantly go out of date so it's incredibly expensive to maintain one that's actually reliable and correct.
Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here.
Paraguay too.
El Salvador does have a decent amount of coverage on street view, but this was done by El Salvador Maps (if you pan the camera down, you'll see this name on the cars used to capture the coverage). The dataset is curated by a member of the Geoguessr community, in which "unofficial" coverage like this is disregarded, which is why you won't see it included.
The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.
