This technical blog post analyzes Google Street View coverage patterns using data processing tools like DuckDB and QGIS. The content does not substantively engage with human rights provisions; however, the open publishing platform demonstrates minimal structural support for freedom of expression.
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.
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.
Streetview 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.
Tangential 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?
The 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.
Sounds 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. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have
While 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?
"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.
I’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.
I 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.
That 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.
Not 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".
I 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?
We need an open version (as OpenStreetMap is to Google Maps).
Mapillary (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.
Knowing 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.
I 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.
It 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.
Google 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?
Costa 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.
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.
I 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.
The 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.