Inside Google Street View: From Larry Page?s Car To The Depths Of The Grand Canyon

“Teleportation is the transfer of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them, similar to the concept apport, an earlier word used in the context of spiritualism.” The concept of moving throughout the world freely without actually having to “physically” travel is the Holy Grail for many. Being able to explore a physical space that is thousands of miles away without having to deal with the rigors of travel seems like something out of a science fiction novel. With Street View, Google has brought us as close as we could possibly get to teleportation – without the actual physical matter transference, of course. The project started as research at Stanford and then hopped into Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car. Snapping photos of every nook and cranny of the planet so that people could travel the world from the comfort of their own homes or mobile devices is the hallmark of Google’s approach to the world around it and the evolution of technology. I spent the day with the founding members of the Street View team to learn about how it went from a gimmick in someone’s mind to a utility that we use without thinking, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to live without. Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, backpacks, bikes and even a snow mobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25, 2007. While the product has had its fair share of controversy, Google has forged ahead. Going somewhere before you actually get there It was a Frankenstein-looking car. Before I spoke with Luc Vincent, engineering director, and Daniel Filip, engineering manager, at Google Maps, I had done quite a bit of research into the history of the Google Maps product as a whole. What I didn’t know is how “pie in the sky” the concept of Street View actually was, which is an easy misconception to have once a technology has become so ubiquitous. Vincent told me a bit about the first concept of Street View, which was hatched at Google based on some experiments being done at Stanford, led by Marc Levoy. Levoy and one of his students had come up with a way to shoot video and paste it together into

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