We just told you about a DIY Street View kit and smaller Street View cars that can navigate narrow roads. Today, Google is showing off a backpack-worn Street View camera that will allow the technology to go wherever a pair of legs can.
While Google Street View's ability to give you a glimpse from the ground anywhere in the world may seem magical, there are still a few streets out there the nosy cars can't roll down. Some of those roads are found in Belgium, where a crowdsourcing effort is cataloging streets too narrow for Google's all-seeing cars.
Remember that Wi-Fi snooping scandal a couple of years ago, where it turned out that Google's Street View cars were downloading people's web surfing info from passing unsecured networks? Now the FCC has come down on Google like a ton of bricks, by fining them about what Google earns in one minute.
It's hard to believe that just seven months ago Japan was rocked with an earthquake and tsunami. In good taste or not, Google had its Street View team drive over 27,000 miles through the torn up region to update its panoramic maps. The views remind us all just how catastrophic a natural disaster can be.
Google's Street View is busily chronicling as much of the planet as it's legally allowed to, and since it's started running out of streets, Google is having to get creative about the areas that the company immortalizes. Next up, whether or not it has any actual streets, is the Amazon.
It can be hard to picture what the neighborhoods of Joplin, MO looked like before a tornado came through and flattened pretty much everything. But this comparison shot using Google Street view makes the destruction painfully clear.