ON GOOGLE TAKING TO THE SKIES?
BIRD'S EYE VIEW...
As a kid, I'd often wondered what it'd be like to see the world from a bird's eye view. This was not a vision of Disneyesque swooping around and over thick forests, green meadows and windy hillsides. It was more about darting around the forest of buildings in a rapidly urbanizing Kuwait City, where I was growing up.
This imagining stayed with me into adulthood, and in my two plus decades in New York City, I've often wondered what it'd be like to see the the canyons of New York from a bird's perspective on demand.
Certainly, with the success of CGI and animated films from Pixar and others, we've seen versions of this vision in films like Stuart Little and Stuart Little 2. But the notion of virtually swooping around any cluster of real buildings in Manhattan may be coming soon to a Google URL near you.
Now this is an entirely speculative notion on my part, and is based on the following data points:
- An 80 engineer Google team is camped out in the Big Apple, tucked away in a Times Square office building working on "some exciting Google products", as noted in an official Google blog.
- A series of intriguing images on the site, "zooming" into a Manhattan building (click for larger image).
3. The team seems to be focused on the math of "bird's eye view" imaging:
"We've taken a group photo of the team standing on our 19th floor terrace from the observation deck of the ESB (Empire State Building-sic) -- we calculated that this requires an effective focal length of 3000mm, which is just right for an astronomical telescope and a digital SLR.
4. A listing of equipment the team is playing around with:
- ...we have several radio-controlled blimps - some with cameras - and a gyroscopically-stabilized four-rotor helicopter that can definitely take folks by surprise. I hope they've cleared all this stuff with Air Traffic Control.
5. Kooky, "out of the box" experimental projects by Internet companies trying to take a fresh look at urban landscapes are not new. Amazon threw down the gauntlet with its A9 Yellow Pages project in major metropolitan markets. The project involves an Amazon team using specially equipped Amazon vehicles with hard-drive/GPS equipped digital cameras taking "street-eye" shots of city streets.
6. Google has already shown its determination to innovate in urban imaging with Google Maps enhanced with satellite images from its Keyhole acquisition (see earlier post "they spy opportunities" on this site).
7. Local businesses are already using bird's eye view imaging technology successfully. Note this story on an Orange County developer of a luxury high-rise residential building selling out its units with panoramic photos of the view from the 11th floor, taken by a radio-controlled helicopter from Coptervision (see picture below). In this case a $5000 investment help sell apartments worth hundreds of thousands.
8. Google has started to fuse yellow page data with Google Maps/Satellite views. As an example, type in "empire state building new york city" into the Google Maps search box, followed by a click on the "satellite" tab.
Finally, let's keep in mind that it's way past April Fool's Day to be reading such fanciful postings on a Google blog, so we should be able to take the baseline post at face value.
So I'll take the hint, and continue to check in regularly to Google Labs.
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