FLORENCE, ITALY – The Google Street View car was spotted this afternoon, June 27, 2014, in the historic center of Florence, Italy. The Google car has traveled on the Ponte Santa Trinita, the riversides of Arno and in the so-called “Roman ancient city” of Florence.
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched on May 25, 2007, in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide.
Street View images appear after zooming in beyond the highest zooming level in maps and satellite images, and also by dragging a “pegman” icon onto a location on a map.
A solid or broken line in the photo shows the approximate path followed by the camera car, and arrows link to the next photo in each direction. At junctions and crossings of camera car routes, more arrows are shown. By using Google Maps, users can turn on stereoscopic 3D mode by right-clicking in Street View to get an anaglyph version of any Street View images. However, this mode requires users to wear red/cyan glasses to see the 3D effects.
Google Street View displays panoramas of stitched images taken from a fleet of specially adapted cars. Areas not accessible by car, like pedestrian areas, narrow streets, alleys and ski resorts, are sometimes covered by Google Trikes (tricycles), snowmobiles or boats.
On each of these vehicles there are nine directional cameras for 360° views at a height of 2.5–3.0 meters , GPS units for positioning and three laser range scanners from Sick AG for the measuring of up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle.
These are used for recording a rough 3D model of the surroundings, enabling faux-3D transitions between distinct panoramas where the environment images are momentarily mapped onto this 3D model while being crossfaded to create an animated perspective change as the user travels from one panorama to another.
There are also 3G/GSM/Wi-Fi antennas for scanning 3G/GSM and Wi-Fi hotspots. More recently, high quality images have been based on open source hardware cameras from Elphel.
In Europe, this kind of coverage is available in 24 countries, of which 17 – Italy included – have complete or near-complete coverage. (Photo: Massimo Lensi)