09-10-2010

[How do you want your eggs cooked?] "Umm, I don't know."

-krypt

This is another big one for the string of good things coming out of Google. Google Street View allows you to get a panorama of the location you’re searching on Google Maps. So far only San Francisco, Denver, Miami, NYC, and Las Vegas are available. It’s pretty amazing being able to see my own apartment on there and let my long distance buddies see the shack that I live in. My friend Chris and I, like the nerds that we are, spent a good half hour or so trying to figure out how they took those pictures. Chris suggested that we look for pictures with reflections. Soon after a coworker forwarded me precisely that, which showed us enough to satisfy our curiosity. Of course, I could have just taken my friend Donald’s advice, which is to think of a good solution to a problem and wait for someone else to do it, which is what Wired did: how Google Street View panoramas are created.