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Google Street View in 2026
- Oarch 7mo agoApologies as this is fairly tangential: There's a parallax effect in Street View on Apple Maps that separates out the layers of every image. Things like lampposts or telephone poles all rotate slightly differently to whatever is behind them. And it's such a subtle effect that I still break my brain trying to determine whether or not I've made it up. Imagine expending that much development time and effort for something you're not even sure is there. And somehow I still find it enviably cool.
- efilife 7mo agoSounds awesome, is there a video of it I could watch somewhere? Edit: for those who didn't know, like me, apple's maps are available at https://maps.apple.com https://maps.apple.com. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have
- MBCook 7mo agoOh that’s right, I always forget they have it on the web.
- modeless 7mo agoOh cool, I didn't know they added their Street View equivalent to the web version. The animated transitions are much better than Google's.
- sundarurfriend 7mo agoDoes it appear only if you visit the website on mobile? I don't see any street view option when I visit that site on a PC.
- Computer0 7mo agoI believe so, I can't test now but I don't see it on desktop either.
- efilife 7mo agoForgive me for copy-pasting. You have to zoom in the map and click on the binoculars in the bottom left corner!
- efilife 7mo agoYou have to zoom in the map and click on the binoculars in the bottom left corner!
- wlesieutre 7mo agoIt's very cool but I don't understand why they've decided to basically not do it in the US and UK. Meanwhile they have nearly full coverage of the rest of western Europe, plus a huge amount of Canada and Mexico. https://i.imgur.com/ZPTozti.png https://i.imgur.com/ZPTozti.png This was launched in 2019. A few years ago I remember speculating that they were holding it back with the cool 3D effects to do a big push alongside Vision Pro, but that's come and gone with no significant change to Look Around. California isn't doing bad, but outside of that they're averaging about 0.5 locations per state. They haven't been to Nashville but they sent someone to drive to Rainbow Lake, Alberta? What gives?
- MBCook 7mo agoOh wow I hadn’t noticed that. It’s especially noticeable when “walking” down the street between points. I’m so glad to finally have that feature in my area. It was the one thing I missed from Google Maps which I otherwise avoid.
- StilesCrisis 7mo agoDrag two fingers on the map and you'll bring the camera down to see the 3D effect more clearly.
- 98codes 7mo agoFor my life, I don't understand the gestures for the 3D map. It would seem that I can ONLY manipulate that view by accident.
- elAhmo 7mo agoI love this and share the experience! It is a very cool effect, specially when moving through the street.
- hnlmorg 7mo agoI just wish Apple would add more streets. London is the closest place with Apple “street view” to me and there are literally a couple of cities (!!!) between me and London. So I don’t hold any hope that Apple will ever get round to coming to my small village if there are entire cities they’ve left out.
- doctoboggan 7mo agoI think it's the same tech they use to make the "3d" background photos on the iPhone wallpaper, which is probably also the same tech used for inferring depth when converting a normal photo to a spatial photo for viewing on an AVP.
- astrange 7mo agoLook around uses a real 3D capture with lidar. If you move around in Mapillary it does do something similar to that using SfM.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 7mo agoIs that base map style inspired by the board game Pandemic, the computer game DEFCON, or a third thing? Edit: Apparently it is "Nova Map" base tile set from ArcGIS.
- modeless 7mo agoStreet 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.
- coldpie 7mo agoThat's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.
- philipallstar 7mo agoNo it's not.
- tt24 7mo ago[flagged]
- pibaker 7mo agoThe problem with communism is you eventually run out of successful organizations to ruin.
- coldpie 7mo agoBreaking 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!
- bagels 7mo agoWhy is there so much dense coverage in southern Ontario than anywhere else in North America?
- aix1 7mo agoAn unusually dense road network? edit: This page has some data: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Landscape-metrics-for-roadless-areas-in-three-broad-regions-of-Ontario-2020-excluding_tbl2_361926838 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Landscape-metrics-for-ro... Southern Ontario has 4x the road density of the province average, so might be a contributing factor?
- OnACoffeeBreak 7mo ago"The darker colours are points that were updated closer to 2007 and the brighter colours closer to December of last year." It's possible that this area was just more recently updated and is not necessarily more densely covered compared to other areas.
- sanswork 7mo agoThat whole part of Ontario is basically farms with long straight concession roads so I imagine you could cover a lot of area quite quickly just driving in a straight line for a couple hours, turning driving 2 km then turning and driving straight for a couple hours on repeat.
- mcntsh 7mo agoStreetview is such an incredible product - one of the few digital products that still manages to bring me joy every day. it'll be a shame when it's inevitably enshitified.
- rootusrootus 7mo ago> it'll be a shame when it's inevitably enshitified Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.
- encom 7mo agoI can see the value of it, certainly, but it's also probably Google's creepiest product. The street where I live, you can see inside peoples kitchens and living rooms on Street View. I had to ask Google twice to block my house, because they fucked it up the first time.
- ks2048 7mo agoEl Salvador looks black but has pretty good coverage throughout the country. Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here. Paraguay too.
- dangond 7mo agoCosta Rica and Paraguay coverage was added recently (within the last year iirc). The author notes Paraguay as an example of a country that was not yet in the dataset they sourced from. El Salvador does have a decent amount of coverage on street view, but this was done by El Salvador Maps (if you pan the camera down, you'll see this name on the cars used to capture the coverage). The dataset is curated by a member of the Geoguessr community, in which "unofficial" coverage like this is disregarded, which is why you won't see it included.
- hmokiguess 7mo agoTangential comment but I still don't understand how we have technology to identify a car license plate from space but we have pixelated images from Antarctica on Google Maps / Google Earth. Why not publish that and make it accessible? Is it true that Antarctica is not easy to scan due to ice and snow?
- bar94 7mo agoPretty sure the license plate/street view level data is from the cars that drive around with a lidar thing strapped to the top, not satellite data
- chias 7mo agoNot sure this is the reason but: it is generally not easy to get a satellite over the poles. You launch close to the equator in the direction of Earth's spin to take advantage of the (very substantial!) speed you already have due to the rotation of the planet. Getting from an equatorial orbit to a polar one requires a huge amount of fuel / energy. You can't just sort of "drive it over". Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program
- addaon 7mo agoThere’s enough satellites in Sun-synchronous orbit (97-ish degree inclination) that polar coverage should be pretty good by now, I’d imagine. The gap from the big guns (GEO and MEO) is more than made up by LEO.
- saynay 7mo agoI wonder if we just don't have many of these types of satellites in a polar orbit, since we don't have as big a need for that type of imagery for the poles?
- jonas21 7mo agoGoogle Maps' high-resolution "satellite" imagery is actually captured from planes. Antarctica is huge (1.5x the area of the US), it would be a dangerous logistical nightmare to fly the sorts of patterns you need to capture aerial imagery there, and it's almost entirely covered in non-descript ice -- what would be the value of having high-resolution imagery there?
- benbristow 7mo agoThe workstation paragraph seems like a humble brag. Most of us yearn for a set-up like that! Especially with the price of components going up thanks to AI and corporations buying all the hardware to support it.
- kccqzy 7mo agoIt is a humble brag. I saw the specs and thought the author would discuss different approaches of finessing the data and a benchmark. There isn’t one. So it’s indeed a humblebrag.
- faxmeyourcode 7mo agoYea, I agree. The dataset is < 100MB... so duckdb can very easily handle this on an old macbook air. https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data
- dewey 7mo agoThe author is known for deep dives on data sets like that (I'm following him on Linkedin for that), so makes sense they always mention their setup even if it doesn't apply to his specific data set.
- orsorna 7mo agoSeems like he ran out of money to get a good GPU though :)
- monitron 7mo agoJust a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK" The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.
- wiredpancake 7mo ago[dead]
- nobody_r_knows 7mo ago[dead]
- articsputnik 7mo agoSwitzerland seems very up to date. Maybe because it's small, or because Google Zurich is developing some of the Google maps features (?)
- Aloisius 7mo agoLarge sections of streets I look at on Google street view are blurred now which has started to seriously limit it's use for me. Since anyone can request a building be blurred forever, I imagine it'll just get worse.
- randomtoast 7mo agoI find it interesting that Germany is lit up like a candle, despite having relatively strict privacy laws. Nowhere else are there more buildings pixelated in Street View than in Germany.
- sunaookami 7mo agoWell StreetView was released in 2010 in Germany and not updated until 2023 (!). And the article doesn't take pixelated houses into account. Nowadays the material is finally up2date again and fewer houses pixelated (I think you had to request it again but nobody cared enough because there was no outrage like back then). The backlash in 2010 was overblown even back then.
- cheschire 7mo agoThe generational memory of the 1930's was still pretty accessible fifteen years ago. Less so now that the children of the late 1940's and early 1950's have mostly moved into an altersheim or are close to it.
- nevi-me 7mo agoI'm a bit upset that there's no screenshot of Africa in the call outs at the bottom. With the detail spec that the author describes, it reminds me that I have an identical CPU but I couldn't get my RAM to run at the advertised 5600Mhz. Hopefully there's updated BIOS so I can try did the issue again. Anyone know if I'd notice meaningful difference by flight from 3600 (what the pc reports) to 5600Mhz?
- Kye 7mo agoLinus Tech Tips just did a video on the impact of RAM speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05HRLuU--jI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05HRLuU--jI This might be one of the applications where it makes a difference.
- avanticc 7mo agoIt is wild to think that Street View was once the most futuristic thing on the internet. Now it feels like a digital relic. The idea of a seamless transition from space to the front door has been a demo-room staple for years, yet we still have that clunky 'click to jump' navigation. It is not just about the visuals. It is about the lost metadata. There is so much semantic information in those images that could be powering a much more intelligent map, but instead, it feels like we are just looking at a very large, very static photo album.
- astrange 7mo agoThat sounds nice, but it turns out nobody actually needs such a map for anything, and you're only using it because it's free. Also, maps constantly go out of date so it's incredibly expensive to maintain one that's actually reliable and correct.
- maxglute 7mo agoWhy is so much of Africa missing? $$$ or safety or laws?
- Humico 7mo ago[dead]
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- matthewpostert 7mo agoR
- matthewpostert 7mo agoRed