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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
by modeless 8mo ago
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.
- coldpie 8mo agoThat's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.
- philipallstar 8mo agoNo it's not.
- tt24 8mo ago[flagged]
- pibaker 8mo agoThe problem with communism is you eventually run out of successful organizations to ruin.
- coldpie 8mo 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!
- tt24 8mo agoGoogle isn’t a monopoly.
- taeric 8mo agoWhile 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?
- modeless 8mo agoThe 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.
- encom 8mo agoReading 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.
- taeric 8mo agoI 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.
- modeless 8mo agoA 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.
- kccqzy 8mo agoWhat 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.
- modeless 8mo agoGoogle 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.
- kccqzy 8mo agoOh 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.
- jdranczewski 8mo agoOn Android they've actually rolled out the 3D view in Maps recently! Took them long enough. I now have an "aerial" button in the bottom left corner when viewing Street View imagery that switches between the two.
- modeless 8mo agoWhoa, you're right! When did they add that? Why would they bury it like that? Nobody will ever find it there. It should be the main satellite view the way it is on the web.
- 8mo ago
- bgro 8mo agoI’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.
- phreeza 8mo agoWas 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.
- EarthLaunch 8mo agoMy 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.
- darkwater 8mo agoI 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.
- ks2048 8mo agoWe need an open version (as OpenStreetMap is to Google Maps). Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/ 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.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoIs this actually open source? The few datasets I found on there are under non-commercial licenses.
- Ruthalas 8mo agoPanoramax[0] is another, perhaps more open option, though it is currently primarily used in Europe. [0] panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/
- Doctor_Fegg 8mo agoMapillary is of course owned by Meta these days.
- hnlmorg 8mo agoYou 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.
- modeless 8mo agoNo, 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!
- lucaslazarus 8mo agoKnowing 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.
- epicureanideal 8mo agoAbsolutely. Imagine being able to look at 100 years of street view history, or several hundred, at some point in the future.
- mostlysimilar 8mo agoI think about this so often. Google Street View and YouTube are full of irreplaceable information. At least it's not Meta, but apart from them it could hardly be in less reliable hands.
- crazygringo 8mo agoWe 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- aeonik 8mo agoGoogle mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- bryceacc 8mo agoMission statements are only there to resonate with people, so that part is working. If the mission doesn't make money, they aren't gonna do it just because it matches a statement
- crazygringo 8mo agoWhich Street View as it is, currently does. And is a phenomenal human achivement. Adding a bonus 3D renderer on top is just a nice-to-have.
- Philip-J-Fry 8mo agoBy selling virtual billboards within the street view
- rationalist 8mo agoThanks for giving them the idea :-/
- glaslong 8mo agoFinally, the metaverse arrives
- amelius 8mo agoThe UX of Google Maps is abysmal even if you don't consider the 3D effects.
- zdragnar 8mo agoThere'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.
- righthand 8mo agoMapquest existed before Google maps. Google maps main advantage was streetview, but if Google maps stopped existing we wouldn’t go back to proprietary closed mapping solutions. That’s silly.
- thunky 8mo ago> By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction Right and if they did you'd likely be complaining about how they ruined Street View by making it a slow bloated mess and should have left it alone.
- mrandish 8mo ago> In 2007 it was visionary and essential ... In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Since around ~2010, Google's culture has gradually transitioned from exploring, discovering and building new businesses to defending and extracting maximum value from existing businesses (eg Enshittification). I was vividly reminded of this listening to the Acquired podcast's three episode Google arc last year. Although the hosts don't explicitly call it out, they do such a good job of exploring all the ways in which pre-2010 Google was incredibly innovative. visionary and exciting, the contrast to today is sobering. While Google deserves credit for leading the way on early AI research pre-2010, they squandered much of their pole position because LLMs were more threat/risk to their huge legacy search business (despite being deployed under the hood). Then, only when the external threat became undeniable, did they respond - requiring a huge come-from-behind to regain most of the lead they'd lost. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google-the-ai-company https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google-the-ai-company