Sometimes when I’m bored I’ll look at random places in Google Street View. Just now I was looking at I-80 in the Nevada desert, and I spotted… A Google Street View car. So in other words, there are two Street View cars here, the one recording the images we’re looking at, which itself isn’t visible, and a second one in the right lane, slightly ahead of the one recording the images.
So what’s going on here? Are they about to “hand off” the image capturing from one to the other? Like this driver’s shift is about to end, and they’re going to turn around at the next exit and head home, while there other car is about to start recording and continue down the freeway?
Maybe they were both heading out to different locations but started from the same place and one was supposed to capture that stretch of highway.
Regardless of the reason, I’m surprised google doesn’t use images from the other car in these situations. Or, at least tell drivers to be X feet/miles apart from each other.
The other car (meaning the one we see in this picture) would also have pictures of a Google Street View car (the one taking this picture).
They’d have to merge the two feeds.
In the OPs example, they could use the feed from the back car for most of the images and anywhere the front car is in the shot, substitute the images from that car.
In the picture, they could (using very rough numbers) use the images taken by the back car for 30 though 360 (or 0) degrees. And then with a little big of trig based on the distance from one car to the other and the angle between the two, it would be simple to figure out which images they need to use from the front car to use.
It wouldn’t be perfect by any means, especially in areas with busier backgrounds, but I think it would be a good second defense if the drivers find themselves taking pictures of each other.
On the other hand, the easiest thing for google to do is probably just to leave it. That spot appears to get new pictures taken a little more than every year and a half. The image will get replaced by a new one soon enough.
Google Streetview is so heavily automated that I doubt it is worth anyone’s time worrying about any potential interaction between the cars. It would be such a tiny edge case with a lot of extra faffing about that any potential benefit would be outweighed by the effort.
And, it’s just a car. I mean, sure, it’s another Google car, but so what? As a practical matter it could be any old car. It’s not like Google need to maintain some illusion that the street view cars don’t exist.
I’ve seen some places where you can literally choose which lane you want to be virtually driving in, on streetview, but I think that’s usually on the approach to junctions and other places where the routes diverge
I think they do make some effort to keep other cars (in general, not just Street View cars) out of the frame, just so they’re not blocking whatever the viewer wants to see. But of course, on busy streets, there’s only so much they can do.