Google street view is comprised of a set of photos taken at various stationary points merged to look like one 360 degree image.
Any idea on what the current count might be for how many individual stationary points exsist in their database?
I haven’t been able to find any figure for the total mileage on Street View worldwide. There is about 238,000 miles covered in the UK alone. The pictures are taken “every 10-20 metres” so let’s call that 50 feet, which makes about 25 million stationary points just in the UK. Apparently there are 9 images taken at each point, according to Wikipedia.
The OP may be confusing two things. The vehicle which takes the pictures is never stationary, unless stopped at a red light, stop sign, or similar occasion. Rather, it takes pictures while it is moving, and more pictures further down the streeet. It takes a whole set of pictures simultaneously, with a whole bunch of cameras all aimed outward from a central point.
So, using Colophon’s figures, the UK has 25 million spots where photos were taken, but that makes 225 million different photos.
Yes, the vehicle is moving but the photos are taken from stationary points. And according to Colophon 9 from each point.
Also complicating things is the speed at which the car is traveling…when I explore with Google Maps, I’ve noticed that the space between two “points” on a 25 mph city street is a lot shorter than the space between two points on a rural 55 mph back road. Possibly it could be because there is “more to see” on those 25 mph city streets the number of photos taken per street mile was adjusted accordingly and is completely independent of the speed of the GoogleCar.
Discrete points is probably a better term than stationary points, which doesn’t really make sense (as opposed to ‘moving points’?, which are what? - and anyway, photos are by their nature static snapshots)
“Stationary points” does have a meaning that makes sense, just not in this context: In math, a stationary point is associated with a function from a set to itself, with the property that f(x) = x. For instance, for the function f(x) = x^2, 0 and 1 are stationary points.
Interesting - I didn’t know that.
But in this context, it wrongly implies that the Google camera vehicle stopped moving at a series of points to take each set of pictures. It is a series of points, and the photos are stationary, because that’s what photos are, but these aren’t stationary points.
fascinating…
anyone care to take a stab at answering the question?
If there are 25 million points in the UK alone, then based on eyeballing the worldwide map of Street View coverage – and bearing in mind that although the UK looks small on the map, it has a very dense network of roads compared to the vast open spaces of Australia and much of the western USA – I estimate that there are about 20 times that amount globally.
So I reckon it’s within an order of magnitude of 500 million (and there are lots more that have been filmed but not yet launched). I wonder if even Google knows how many miles of street are covered?
Edit… maybe I’m underestimating - it’s hard to tell as the coverage of the USA is by no means complete, even though there is a huge area shown in blue.