Where's this Street View from?

GeoGuessr has to be one of the most popular and shared Google Maps based applications of 2013. Map Tag is a new Street View game that pretty much follows the same format.

In the game you are shown a Street View image of a random location around the world and you have to guess the correct location by clicking on a Google Map. You are then awarded points based on how near you were to the actual

Tour the White House with Street View

The Blue Room

Google Maps has released Street View imagery for the White House. Now in Google Maps you can take a virtual interactive tour of the official residence of the President of the United States.

Here are some quick links to take you to specific rooms:

The State Floor

Entrance Hall
The Entrance Hall (also called the Grand Foyer) is the primary and formal entrance to the White House.

The East Room
The East Room is the largest room in the White House. The picture to the right of the yellow curtains is the White House's oldest possession, the Lansdowne portrait depicting George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1797.

The Blue Room
The Blue Room is used for receptions, receiving lines, and is occasionally set for small dinners.

The Red Room
The Red Room has served as a parlor and music room, and recent presidents have held small dinner parties in it. The Madisons, Lincolns, Grants, and Kennedys all used the Red Room as a music room. A guitar, piano and music stands were kept in the room. Today a music stand beside the fireplace recalls that earlier use of the room.

The Green Room
The Green Room is one of three state parlors on the first floor in the White House. It is used for small receptions and teas. During a state dinner, guests are served cocktails in the three state parlors before the president, first lady, and visiting head of state descend the Grand Staircase for dinner.

The State Dining Room
The State Dining Room is the larger of the two dining rooms on the State Floor of the White House.


The East Room

The Ground Floor

The China Room
The White House's collection of state china is displayed in the China Room. The collection ranges from George Washington's Chinese export china to Bill Clinton's ivory, yellow, and burnished gold china. The room is primarily used by the first lady for teas, meetings, and smaller receptions.

The Vermeil Room
The Vermeil Room houses a collection of silver-gilt or vermeil tableware, a 1956 bequest to the White House by Margaret Thompson Biddle. Portraits of American First Ladies also hang in the room.

The Library
The Library is used for teas and meetings by the President and First Lady. John Adams, the first President to live in the White House, used this room as a laundry room; at that time it was said to have been filled with "Tubs, Buckets, and a variety of Lumber."

Information for each of the rooms comes from Wikipedia.

Goofy Visits Your House in Street View

Giant Steps - Disney is a fun Google Maps based application from Disney that lets you invite a giant Goofy to your house.

Once you share your address with the application you can watch a video of a giant Goofy landing on your street (with a little help from Google Maps satellite view). Goofy then walks down your street (using Street View imagery) and actually opens the window of your house.

After you have created and watch your personalised video you can share it with the world via Facebook or Twitter.

The application obviously owes a lot to Chaos in Your Town. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they were both created by the same map developers.

Is this the New Aesthetic on Google Maps?

Floating Shiny Knot is an impressive experiment using canvas with Street View.

The application superimposes an animated shiny knot on top of any Street View image (you can choose a chrome or glass finish for the knot). This is very impressive. However if you rotate and drag the Street View around then the application soars to even higher levels of impressiveness.

To view this you will need a modern browser (try Chrome).

What is the New Aesthetic?

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Cherry Blossom Season on Google Maps

Google has released a special Cherry Blossom Season Street View Guide to Japan. The guide highlights some of the best Street View images found on Google Maps in Japan, including the most beautiful Cherry Blossom images.

Using the guide it is possible to explore a number of Japanese cities. The Street Views for each city are organised into a number of categories, including 'sights', 'lodging', 'restaurants' and 'shopping'. These categories include a number of new Street View images taken inside shops, hotels and restaurants.

Via: Google Lat Long

Lights, Street View, Action

Roter Faden Hannover is a website that provides immersive 360 degree videos of Hannover in Germany.

Immersive videos are like Street View, only instead of still images they use video footage. As the video plays the user can control the direction of the camera. Roter Faden Hannover has created a number of these immersive videos on the streets of Hannover.

The site uses Google Maps, with OpenStreetMap map tiles, to show the location of the streets that currently have immersive video coverage.


StreetView.ch has been using Google Maps for a while to map video Street Views in Switzerland. It's coverage now includes video Street Views in Switzerland, Vietnam and Dubai.

Your Childhood Memories in Street View

Ever since Zefrank's Childhood Walk I've been waiting for someone to provide a Street View memory tagging application.

In a Childhood Walk Ze asked people to think of a walk that they used to make as a child. He then asked them to recreate the walk virtually using Google Maps Street View. Whilst on the walk, if a specific childhood memory came to mind, he asked people to write it down and take a screenshot of the Street View.

Even since reading the nostalgic submissions people made to Childhood Walk I've been thinking about building an app that allowed users to select a Street View of a childhood scene and asking them to add a short comment about what the place in the Street View means to them.

Jux - Teleportation isn't quite that application but it comes close. Users of Jux can choose any Street View image from Google Maps and add a comment. The Jux application doesn't have to be used for childhood memories - but it can be.

Here is one of my earliest visual memories of Shirley Oaks in London.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Rain Forest Street View Out Now

Google has today released amazing Street View imagery of the Amazon River in Brazil.

The new Street View imagery includes the the Rio Negro and some Amazon forests. A good place to start exploring the new imagery is in this Amazon Street View Gallery.



As well as the new Amazon Street View Google has also released Street View imagery for the major towns in Poland.

Via: Google Lat Long

Street View Takes to the Skies

If you have some Friday night plans you might want to wait until tomorrow before you visit this website. I started writing this post over two hours ago now but I keep getting distracted by more and more beautiful 360 degree panoramas.

Last week we learnt that Google has plans to take underwater Street View images of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. My guess is that at some point in the future Google will also start capturing aerial panoramic imagery and add them to Google Maps.

Luckily we don't actually have to wait for Google to invent the flying Street View car, as AirPano.ru already has a great collection of panoramic images of some of the world's most favourite landmarks and destinations.

Each of the panoramic images uses Google Maps to show the location of the image and to show the current field of view. A Google Map of all the available panoramas provides a useful way for finding aerial panoramas of your favourite locations.

The Russian Street View Gallery

The new release of Street View in Russia has captured some great images of buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I've started to put together a Russian Street View Gallery to showcase some of the best Street Views in Russia.

The gallery uses the Google Street View Image API to provide preview images of the Street Views in the gallery. Just click on any of the small thumbnail images to view the full Street View in the full Google Map.

Street View Launched in Russia

Red Square

Google Maps now has Street View imagery in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. There is also a little pocket of Street View around the Qolsharif Mosque in Kazan. Street View Fun also discovered that one street in Lodz, in Poland has also been given Street View.

In Moscow you can now take a virtual stroll on Google Maps around Red Square and the Kremlin. In St.Petersburg you can stroll around the whole UNESCO Heritage site of the centre of St. Petersburg. This includes the Winter Palace and The Peter and Paul Fortress.


The Peterhof Palace, St.Petersburg

Some more Russian landmarks that can now be viewed in Street View are:

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow
The Peterhof Palace, St.Petersburg (and all the Palace gardens)
The Old St.Petersburg Stock Exchange
The Church of the Saviour on Blood, St Petersburg

Via: Google Lat Long

Street View - Hot or Not?

Beautiful Streets is an interesting 'pairwise survey' from OpenPlans to find out how people perceive different urban environments.

The survey presents a series of Street View images of two different streets and asks the user to simply choose which is more beautiful. The Street Views are randomly selected from 200 streets in Philadelphia.


MIT's Place Pulse project is a crowd-sourced experiment also examining people's perceptions of different urban environments.

The project presents two Street View images from Google Maps and asks users to vote for which place looks more 'unique', 'safer' or 'upper class'.

As well as contributing to the research by answering the questions you can view the results and view which of the Street Views appear most or least safe, unique or upper-class to the majority of respondents.

Street View Japan - The Inside Story

The Japanese Street View Gallery is a great collection of some of the most interesting places in Japan, as captured by Google Maps Street View. The collection includes some great new indoor Street Views.

The new Street View locations take us inside a number of temples, churches and even deep underground inside the Japanese Akiyoshido caves. Why not take some time out today from your busy schedule and make a virtual visit to the amazing Shisen-dō zen gardens?



If you are at all interested in art then you should also view famous Japanese artist Hokusai's stunning ceiling painting of a phoenix at the Gansho-in Temple.

Martian Street View

A couple of week ago I started working on creating a Martian Street View Map using panoramas of Mars captured from NASA's Mars' missions.

I ran into a few problems with the map and more or less gave up on the project until Rob of Map Channels stepped in and kindly offered to help. Thanks to Rob we now have a working Martian Street View Map

There are a few problems with the map - all of which are due to me and are not a result of Rob's excellent work. I had a lot of difficulty working out where the panoramas should be located on the map - in fact I'm fairly certain I've actually put nearly all of them in the wrong place (if you spot errors in the geo-location of the images and know the correct latitude and longitude for Google Mars please let us know in the comments).

There are also some problems in the way different browsers display the panoramas. I think the Street Views should display properly in Firefox but may look strange in some versions of Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Street View Launched in South Korea

Myeongdong Cathedral, Seoul

Google might not have maps in North Korea but it does now have Street View in South Korea.

Google Maps today introduced Street View for South Korea's two largest cities Seoul and Busan.

Via: Google LatLong

Street View Rival in Tibet

View from the Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet

Google Maps and Bing Maps are not the only online map providers to offer a Street View type service. Chinese search engine SOSO.com's online maps also provides Street View for a number of locations.

SOSO has Street View type imagery available in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and in some of the surrounding area.



Also See

MapJack - Street View type imagery for Thailand
Norc - coverage in central and eastern Europe, including in Poland and Austria
Mapplo - panoramic imagery for Argentina
Yandex - coverage in Russia

Via: Street View Funny

Stereographic Street View

Who would have guessed that Google Maps Street View looks even better when viewed stereographically. Street View Stereographic would - that's who.

Using Street View Stereographic you can view any Street View image in a stereographic projection. The app comes with a handy search bar so it is easy to find your favourite locations and view them sterographically. The app also has a dynamic URL so, if you find a great view, you can share a link to the view with your friends.

Street View Stereographic uses WebGL so you will probably need to use the Google Chrome browser to view the app.

Create a Timelapse Street View Movie

The brilliant Address is Approximate mixes stop-motion animation with some timelapse images from Google Maps Street View.

If you want to create your own timelapse movie from Street View then you can follow Digital Inspirations online tutorial How to Create a Time-Lapse Movie with Google Street View. The tutorial explains how to create an AutoHotkey text file that will help you capture a series of Street View images automatically. You can then import the images into Windows Live Movie Maker (or any other video editing software) to create your timelapse movie.

Some Other Street View Timelapse Movies

• Timelapse of Interstate 5 - Mexico to Canada
• Timelapse of the Trans-Canada Highway
• Golden Gate Bridge

It's Snowing on Street View

A definite theme is emerging this week involving Christmas messages with Street View. Send a Christmas Street View Message is another very clever Google Maps app that lets you send a personal holiday greeting with your selected Street View.

Once you select a Street View location and add your own personal message this app creates a stylised Street View scene featuring snow and your greeting. The app pans and zooms around your chosen Street View accompanied by some nice soothing Christmas related music.

Once you are happy with your personal Christmas Street View scene you can send the URL link to your friends. This app uses WebGL, so you will need to use a compliant web browser (may I recommend Google Chrome).

A Google Maps Christmas Movie

This year it seems that everyone is trying to outdo everyone else by creating the best Maps Google Street View based Christmas Card wizard. Digital photo album specialists Hofmann have really pushed the boat out with the Christmas and Hofmann Christmas movie creator.

Christmas and Hofmann lets you create your very own Christmas movie in which Santa is shown visiting your own home (with some clever superimposed images from Street View). The app also lets you upload up to eight photographs, which are then featured in the finished movie.



Once you have created your personal Christmas movie you can send a link to it by e-mail or share it with your friends via Facebook or Twitter.

Also See

• Shelter - House Bling Christmas Cards - decorate your house in Street View with Christmas decorations
• Share a Carol with Google Maps Street View - send a Christmas carol movie featuring your selected image from Street View
• Xmap-Card - make your own Xmas card by rearranging map tiles
• Everyone Deserves a White Christmas - Create a snow scene by selecting any Street View image