Google Street View Celebrates 15 Years With a Time Travel Feature, New Camera

pcmag.com:

Google Street View is celebrating 15 years of mapping by upgrading to a new camera and allowing us to easily travel back in time using our smartphones.

We've all spotted at least one Google Street View car over the last decade and a half, but the company can't always rely on four wheels and an engine to collect high-quality images.

"From the back of a camel in the Arabian desert to a snowmobile zipping through the Arctic, we've gotten creative with the ways we've used Street View cameras to capture imagery," Ethan Russell, director of product for Google Maps, wrote in a blog announcement(Opens in a new window). "And if there's one thing we've learned, it's that our world changes at lightning speed. Our hardware is one way we're able to keep up with the pace."

In addition to the Street View car and Trekker backpack, Google is piloting a new ultra-transportable, mobile-controlled camera system roughly the size of a house cat. Weighing less than 15 pounds, the new camera can be shipped anywhere and attached to any vehicle with a roof rack. It's expected to roll out next year "in fun Google colors."

As well as viewing locations as they are now, mobile Street View is introducing a way to travel back in time and see how things used to look.

Android and iOS users browsing images of a location can tap "See more dates" to view "historical" imagery—dating back to Street View's 2007 launch. Depending on how far back Google started capturing mapping data for the location you are viewing, a range of dated images should pop-up for you to experience an area how it used to be. This could be especially surprising for areas of the world that have undergone major changes either by design or world events.

Google uses computer vision and AI