Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision.
By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and satellite views and allowing smooth free camera motion all the way from space to the front door of buildings and even inside. Many years ago I saw internal Google demos of dramatically improved Street View rendering, none of which ever made it to production. Google has consistently failed to recognize the value of the product and systematically underinvested in the user experience.
Knowing Google’s tendency to kill things they try and fail to revamp, I’ll take this stagnation as long as they keep updating it with new imagery. Street View is the greatest project in human historiography; there’s too much to lose to silly Google management.
Absolutely. Imagine being able to look at 100 years of street view history, or several hundred, at some point in the future.
We could be... but why? What's the product?
It makes sense they prototyped it. But putting it into production is $$$, way more expensive than current street view.
Current street view works well enough. How is a massively upgraded 3D version, that is bloated and slower to use on older devices, going to make Google more money?
It feels more like a separate product to license to architecture firms, city planners, video game studios, etc.
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While I agree something like this sounds really neat, I am curious what the value proposition is? Pointedly, is it any higher than doing the same thing in a video game in a fantasy world?
A more accurate, 3D mapped street view could probably allow GPS-less geolocation and could also help autonomous vehicles as they would get more information than what they can immediately see.
I could see well-mapped street view with good services built around it, and maybe a way to pay for and schedule regular updates, being used for towns to monitor public space long term too.
I think many things could be built on a better street view, but I also don't want Google to get yet another de facto monopoly in a new domain.
>could also help autonomous vehicles as they would get more information than what they can immediately see.
Waymo and others already do this, that's why they can only operate in mapped areas.
Given that Waymo is a google company, they almost certainly started with street view data.
This already exists. If my phone fails to get a good GPS signal Google Maps prompts me to turn the camera on and spin around in a circle. I would also be unsurprised to learn Waymo uses Street View
The difference is that it's useful for navigating the real world. You could have way better directions displays that show directions in context instead of just schematically. It would make the petabytes of imagery that has already been collected much more accessible and therefore useful, instead of being relegated to a special clunky Street View mode that is rarely visited. It would enable exploring real spaces in a way that provides much better spatial context, to build a spatial memory that helps your navigation when you get to the real place. And yes, it would be fun. At one time, Google was into that sort of thing.
I could see this as an argument for a heads up display. So, good for projecting directions onto a windshield or for having the glasses thing. But this? I don't see how a VR world helps anyone navigate the real world. That is, you seem to be saying the VR data is needed for AR usage. And I just don't see how those are helping each other too much.
I'm fully bought off on the "it would be fun" aspect. I don't see a value proposition for it, though.
A heads up display doesn't need a 3D rendering of the environment around it because the environment is already visible through the screen. The 3D rendering is so you can see what to expect before you get there. If you don't understand why that could possibly be useful then I don't know what to tell you; you'll have to take it for granted that some people's brains work differently than yours and can benefit from seeing places they are about to visit in 3D before they get there.
Apologies, I meant my point to be that navigating a place is more helped with AR techniques than it is VR ones. Which, as you say here, is less helped by 3D rendering than it is other things. Indeed, I meant that to be my point.
Do I think it could be useful if you rehearse navigating a place before getting there? Yeah. Ish. I can see obvious military style value adds for that. Average person, though? I still have a hard time seeing the value.
Reminds me when places were offering video tours of places. Is a neat idea. But ridiculously low in actual value.
Google maps has two different versions of this. One of them has a step by step series of street view images and the other does a full animated fly through of every street. The second one may be web only.
Reading a map isn't that hard. It just sounds like an elaborate way to illustrate navigation with crayons. A cool product demo, but not very useful in practice.
We need an open version (as OpenStreetMap is to Google Maps).
Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/) has surprisingly good coverage in some places, but the experience is lacking, partly because most of the images (where I've looked) aren't 360 views.
Panoramax[0] is another, perhaps more open option, though it is currently primarily used in Europe.
[0] panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/
Is this actually open source? The few datasets I found on there are under non-commercial licenses.
I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
Was leetcode-style interviewing not a thing before that? Cracking the coding interview was published in 2008 so I would assume it was already quite established by then.
I would argue that back then leetcode-style interviews probably filtered for the real talent Google was looking for (and that made possible many things). Then companies started cargo-culting it and people started gaming the system.
My first job, in California, was just transitioning to leetcode-style interviews in 2007 following the industry trend. So it was probably spreading around that time.
You can do that with Google Earth VR. It’s actually really cool in VR. You feel like Godzilla.
Unfortunately it’s only a small subsets of major cities and the implementation feels so half-baked it could have been an AWS service.
But it’s still a cool tech demo nonetheless.
No, you can't. Google Earth VR is indeed awesome (I am biased because I was involved in its creation), however there is no seamless integration between Street View and satellite view, and no free camera motion or even stereo rendering support for Street View in Google Earth VR. Google Earth VR was essentially abandoned and hasn't been updated at all since 2018, as can be seen in its Steam listing. This is due to the sad failure of the Daydream team.
Finally there is a glimmer of hope now that Android XR is happening. There is a new version of Google Maps for Android XR that does finally have a 3D reconstruction feature for Street View, but only for building interiors. Hopefully it won't be abandoned this time!
That's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.
No it's not.
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The problem with communism is you eventually run out of successful organizations to ruin.
Breaking up monopolies is a requirement for competition & healthy markets. Enforcing anti-trust laws is pro-capitalism, pro-business, and pro-consumer. Imagine how many more tech improvements we would have if Google had to compete for its users instead of squashing its competitors!
Google isn’t a monopoly.
The DOJ and the court that heard the case disagree with you https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
The UX of Google Maps is abysmal even if you don't consider the 3D effects.
There's arguments to be made that it could be better, to be sure, but I also remember when GPS driving directions were dedicated devices and you had to pay a few hundred bucks a year to get updated maps. For such an expensive product, it wasn't any better in many regards.
I'm rather happy Google maps exists and can't complain too much about using it for free.
What you describe seems to have been implemented in Google Earth. It seems like an intentional product choice to do it in Google Earth and not Google Maps. Most people use Google Maps to get directions and reviews of places, and very few people I know even use the street view feature.
Google Earth and Google Maps 3D satellite view on desktop web have essentially the same rendering of Street View, which hasn't materially changed in 10 years or more and does not have the features I described. Google Maps on mobile never integrated the 3D satellite view at all, which represents another regrettable lack of investment on Google's part.
People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view and directions then it would see much more usage.
Oh I thought the desktop 3D satellite view was powered by combining the regular satellite view and street view. Looks like that’s not the case.
