San Franciscans will recognize this fellow in Willie Mays Plaza.
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/29/google-maps-goes-streetside/
Nifty! And certainly better for those of us who recognize landmarks better than (poorly lit) street names.
The option doesn’t seem to be available here in the UK. 
Damn!
I realize that there would be a lot of abuse if they opened this up to just anyone, but man would I love to take part in adding to this.
Pardon, San Franciscans will recognize THIS fellow.
It appears to be available only in San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, New York, and Miami for now.
Well, I recognized the first place as the Lucky 13, one of my favorite bars, and withing crawling distance of my friend’s house.
And yeah, I recognize that other guy too.
Cool! I did the Empire State Building. Yay, wait till I tell everyone at tomorrow’s staff meeting.
It’s available in parts of Oakland and Berkeley, too, as well as some highways, even a few rural ones.
Judging by the tree-trimming on my block, these pics are taken within the past two months, IIRC.
I came here to say that this is the coolest thing Google has done yet, and then I realized that you can click the picture and whirl it around.
AWESOME.
I swear I’ve seen an independent variant of that at some point a couple of years back that was done in sequence shots in all 4 cardinal directions every so many feet, and you could click to virtually drive up and down each street over a large portion of (IIRC) NYC. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called, but it was pretty neat.
I presume this “street side view” is only available if your domain originates from a city it covers.
Amazon’s A9 had (maybe still does) a feature like you’re talking about.
I saw stuff like this on the Web in, what 1993? 94? Something like that. And I think MIT and Carnegie-Mellon were doing it in non-HTML form before then. And then when Apple brought out Quicktime VR, they were doing something similar as a demo for that.
So the concept is certainly nothing new; it’s just that you need fat pipes and a server farm the size of Google’s to roll it into production.
Huh… it’s also interesting how the Street View is more current than the Satellite view. This freeway offramp in the Sat view has been demolished for years, but the Street View shows the current intersection.
That offramp was replaced with this offramp, which, according to the sat view, is still beneath a freeway.
It’s gone now (though a9.com still works, but it’s just a search engine) so I can’t tell, and though it’s archived on archive.org it doesn’t display anything useful. As I recall it was a pretty simple interface and seemed more to be a proof of concept than anything. You had your main view with thumbnails of what was in the other directions at your current locations and arrows to tell it which direction to travel in, as well as a small overview map to tell you where you currently are. It also only covered a certain portion of New York (possibly Manhattan). Still, it was cool. You could virtually wander all over that area and see the sights at ground level on either side of the street.
Cool! The Lucky 13 was just around the corner from one of my first apartments in SF… and I managed to (slowly) “drive” down 880… Think it took about the same amount of time as it used to when I was commuting!
What would be really cool is if Google let you run it as a movie… I’m assuming from the quality that they just took stills out of a videocamera… I wanna put it back and go wherever I want…
Sort of like a trip home without the jetlag! Thanks for sharing it.
I can see my house! W00t!!! (It’s the blue one)
ETA: On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t post my address.
That’s OK, we can still find it. We’ll be over for drinks tomorrow at 6 sharp.
I also see they’ve added exit numbers to interstate highways and 3-D wireframes of buildings in metro areas (St. Louis, MO, at least). Are those new or am I just unobservant?
Wow! That is so cool! I can see both my current apartment and the new one I will be moving to!
One of the earliest such systems was the Aspen Movie Map, from when back when, in 1978.
Aspen Moviemap (with a short video)
I’ll have everyone know that Lucky 13 is still just as glorious a shithole as ever. 