How Does Google Maps Get Street Level Photos?

Big Brother is watching you, your neighbors and all of your friends! But Agent Google doesn't ride in a stretch limousine with a James Bond pen camera. He rocks a Toyota Prius with nine cameras installed in all directions and a trigger happy Ivy League graduate riding shotgun, who coordinates the photography efforts with other geeks, who plug each batch of photos in to GPS mapping software.

Agent Google's work has been sloppy at times, as evidenced by the flattening of Bambi and driving through a wall and finding HELL close to Amish Country in Pennsylvania. But, let us give credit where credit is due. Agent Google has taken hundreds of millions of photographs (nine photos for every ten feet of road) and documented most of the United States of America, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan. Rumor has it that South Africa and Brazil will be photographed by mid 2010.

All jokes aside, here is how it works:

The HARD Way (Making a panorama with a single camera)- Imagine a camera on a tripod in front of you (just a single camera for this example). 1.) You would start out by snapping a picture of what is in front of you. Before you move the camera, you look at the edge of the "picture" on the right hand side of the camera and take a "mental note" of what is "there". 2.) Next, you slowly turn the camera to the right until the imagery that was on the right (the mental note), shifts to the left hand side of the view finder. 3.) Then you would snap another photograph.

A photographer would repeat steps 1,2 and 3 until you returned to the view from the first photo....and then you would have to consider up and down!

It is possible to turn all of these images in to a panorama on a photo editing program such as Photoshop. But that would be terribly time consuming!

Imagine doing that hundreds of millions of times!

On such an ambitious project, a more efficient method is needed.

The Google Way (A Panorama made by multiple cameras, specially calibrated to fit a spherical viewing space)- Imagine a hockey puck. Eight cameras are placed in different directions around the circumference of the hockey puck and one camera, with a wide angle (fisheye) lens is placed atop the hockey puck. The cameras are calibrated to work together. When one camera's "picture" ends, another camera continues the panorama. A camera is strapped to the roof of a car, and a cluster of nine pictures is taken for every ten feet of road. Then, each cluster of photos are plugged in to a computer program that connects them to a location marked by a Global Positioning System (GPS).

Panorama Paranoia- Internet users have spent a lot of time observing the Earth on Google Maps. But many people are threatened by the "Street View" function. They consider it an invasion of privacy. Here is a fun parody about the reach of Google: