You can now put photos in Google Street View yourself
Do you not recognize your own street when you look on Google Street View? Of course, Street View cars only drive around once in a while to take pictures. For example, a neighborhood can look very different in summer than in winter. That is why Google has decided that everyone can now contribute to Street View, in order to further expand the database with images. Anyone with an Android phone can upload images in the Street View app and place them in the right place on Google Maps. There is a special tool that allows you to record a series of images while driving down a street.
Augmented reality
The images are taken with ARCore, the same augmented reality technology that Google uses for Live View. After you’ve started mapping a street and you’ve published everything in the Street View app, Google gets to work. The images are rotated and positioned and placed exactly on the google spot in Google Maps. That doesn’t have to be your own street, you can play ‘Street View driver’ anywhere.
Special cameras
Previously, 360-degree cameras were used to shoot the images for Google Street View. You can attach these kinds of cameras to the roof of your car, but they are not cheap. Now anyone with an Android phone can shoot and share images. This allows Google to offer even better maps to users of Google Maps . That can certainly be useful, because there are places that change quickly and are therefore now difficult to recognize on Street View. Or look very different in a particular season.
Mapping the world
Google has already mapped a considerable part of the world with Street View, but there are still plenty of missing parts. The new function makes it possible to also map the parts that are not yet visible. By letting people add images themselves, Street View continues to expand. In some places a collection of images of users may arise. If there are images from Google Street View itself, they will always be shown first. As with all Street View images, license plates and faces are also blurred in the photos added by users.
The function is now being rolled out worldwide, so we have to wait and see when the tool appears in your Street View app. There is no mention of iOS users in the press release by Google . For the time being it seems that they cannot yet use the option to shoot images themselves.
In the meantime, you can still encounter funny scenes on Street View, as this account on Twitter shows: