Nixta Sinks

New glasses, sir?

Google today launched Google Street Maps. A technological advance, but little more, other than perhaps a reply to Microsoft's offering (though I haven't tried that out yet because I'm too lazy to click on some links, but then again I'm so lazy I want to have decent images of where I could otherwise walk or drive so that I can recognise where on the FDR I currently am).

It's actually a neat idea, of course. People navigate by landmarks and features, not by numbers on a street. It's a method of navigation that's scalable and applicable, and instantly recognisable. It doesn't depend on the owner of the property nailing up numbers in the same place, or trees being trimmed to see the numbers, or the numbers being painted a distinctive colour or even displayed in a readable typeface (Die, Comic Sans! Die!).

However, it does rely on the landmarks being visible, and there not being "stretch-marks". In the above image, two problems are immediately apparent. The first, a compound problem: Quality of the picture. Focus and exposure. There's no way to tell that this is Circa Now on East 6th Street. The second: In order that the photography can be collected cheaply, it's good not to have traffic. You pay for fewer hours. But sadly that means that you're driving around early morning when the shops are closed (and, incidentally, the lighting in the city is bad). As an experiment, it's of course acceptable, but as a useful navigational or reference tool, it's rendered (if you'll excuse the unintented pun) utterly useless.

At last, a drunk driving simulator.

Looking at the above image of my street in Stuyvesant Town, you can see that the shutter-speed on the camera (again, probably down to the time of day and the lighting available) is not high enough. Objectively, there's no point in that image at all. Utterly useless. Perhaps worse than useless.

Of course, it will improve.

What may be interesting would be trawling through the various images available now and building up a map of better focused, better exposed imagery. Essentially a spatial representation of where imagery is useful. Could take a long time.

Much less time though will be taken before people build hacks and mashups that overlay better imagery and advertisements on the map. Perhaps a real picture of Nicole's store...

Labels: gis, google