Peggy Revell
You can get a 360° view of the streets of Fort Frances without even leaving your home now that parts of Rainy River District have been added to Google Maps’ “Street View” tool.
Street views can be seen by visiting http://maps.google.com and searching for a location (such as “Fort Frances, ON”).
When the map appears, if “Street View” is available for the location, you can access it by clicking the yellow person figure (nicknamed “Pegman”) that is located above the map’s zoom in/zoom out tool.
Once the street view is loaded, you navigate around horizontally by 360° or vertically by 290° while travelling along different roads.
While certain locations in the district now have street views, others—such as remote areas—are not yet available.
Google’s project began in May, 2007 in the United States and slowly has expanded to include “street views” of various locations around the world.
The company is promoting the tool as having a variety of uses, such as for directions, business promotion, showing real estate, or virtual field trips.
The images are collected through a specially-made camera and equipment—mounted to the top of a car—which matches the images to locations using GPS.
After the images are captured, they are then “sewn” together, creating the 360° “panorama,” explains Google’s FAQ page for “Street View.”
Images are not necessarily recent ones—and can be even years old depending on when the “Street View” car visited a location.
Google even has rigged the equipment to large tricycles to capture the view of various locations that its cars may not be able to normally reach, such as hiking and biking trails or college campuses.
Images only are collected of views which would be available to the public, such as what would be seen while walking down a sidewalk.
Google also blurs out both faces of people and licence plates of cars that are in the images.
People can request that certain views—such as their homes and cars—be removed.
While the view is limited to what can be seen in public, various private locations also have worked with Google to make “street views” available online, including UNESCO World Heritage sites such as the ruins of Pompei, the Palace of Versailles, and Stonehenge.
The most recent use of this technology coincides with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where Google has captured the views of various venues.
By rigging the “Street View” equipment to a snowmobile, people even can travel along Whistler’s ski runs which the Olympic athletes will be using.
