We all love seeing satellite images, and you can currently look at a street view of any image if its available by clicking on the pegman icon. And we will soon be implimenting a street view feature so you can also post and share interesting street views. So what is street view?
Basically Google Street View is a function of Google Maps and Earth letting you view many areas and streets of the world in a 360° horizontal and 290° degree vertical panoramic views from a set number of positions along the streets set at around 10-20 metres at a height of around 2.5 metres.
The service was rolled out on May 25th 2007, and has since been expanding to incorporate additional areas. Street View is currently available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.
The pictures you can view were taken from a fleet of vehicles both 2 and four wheeled including a Chevrolet Cobalt, Saturn Astra and Toyota Prius cars in America. In Europe Vauxhall Astras cars, in Australia and NZ Holden Astra cars. In narrower pedestrian areas and places unaccessable by vehicles Google tricycles are employed. On these modes of transport sit a nine directional camera for the all round views, GPS units for positioning, three laser range scanners for the measuring of up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle.
A straight or broken line in the photo shows the approximate path followed by the camera car; two arrows link to the next photo in each direction. At junctions and crossings of camera car routes, more arrows are shown.
Controversy
After dealing with the logistical challenge of taking millions of seperate pictures around the world, Street View has also suffered massive criticism from privacy campaigners and organisations since the launch. An American couple even went as far as to sue Google over invasion of privacy although they subsequently lost the case.
“We recognise that people do have some concerns in terms of privacy,” said Google’s geospatial technologist Ed Parsons. “But this is the sort of level of detail you would get from driving down a road, the sort of picture you would see in an estate agent’s window.”
In a bid to calm the nerves of the privacy brigade, Street View only 
contains imagery that is already visible from public roads. So for example 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace in London is not visible in street view mode.
Street View also has blurring technology built in that automatically blurs both faces and licence plates.
There has also been controversy over embarrasing pictures showing people in various states of undress and doing a variety of embarrasing things. Of course one persons embarrasment is our enjoyment.
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