Friday, March 12, 2010

Google Streetview Covers All Roads in UK

Via Ed Parsons I learn that the Google streetview car has been busy covering the length and breadth of the UK:

This is the Ford in Neen Savage, Shropshire, UK. I've spent many happy hours here throwing sticks for dogs to fetch from the river.

Google seem to have done all the rural public roads in the UK including dead ends and this rather fetching view of the flow country in the North of Scotland, I would guess the least populated area of the country

Its an amazing piece of work, I'm drooling at the educational possibilities, e.g. getting students to hunt for abandoned buildings in Scotland and Hampshire then comparing the results as an exercise in rural deprivation.

Streetview in Google Earth: You can also access the same data in Google Earth and incorporate it in a tour. This KMZ example is a location we take our students to and the tour could serve as a brilliant introduction or debrief for a field visit. A shame the tour doesn't activate the detailed imagery in the Streetview bubble but hey, the students can go back and explore for themselves later.

Streetview Tour HowTo: To produce your own streetview tour in Google Earth:
  1. Turn on the Streetview layer in the Places column. Select the streetview bubble you wish to use.
  2. Right click the Bubble, copy and then past into your Places column.
  3. Record a tour as normal, by double clicking the bubble in the main screen you will be flown to the centre of it.
  4. Save the bubble and tour in a file and you're done.
Well done Google! I'm fascinated to know how many cars it took to do this, it must have been a lot of fun doing too, well, except for the Luddite mobs defending middle England.

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Hi Rich,
I had a question for you. I viewed this post back when it first came out. Now, many months later I find myself needing to make a google earth tour with streetview imagery so I looked up your post. However, now it seems that Google has blurred the street view imagery when used as part of a tour. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong so I came back to your website but when I use the kml tour file I find the same thing. Do you know of any workaround?

Rich Treves said...

Ryan,

Yes, you can't enter the view sphere in a tour which is a pain. There are various work arounds to this:
- record as a video
- Capture an image of the sphere and use as a screen overlay

but none of them are very satisfactory.

Rich