Riding Shotgun With the Google Street View Beetle

Popular Mechanics takes a ride in an Immersive Media VW Beetle, one of the six cars that drives around America shooting images for Google Maps Street View. Mounted on the roof is the $45,000 Dodeca 2360 video camera, whose 11 lenses record a 360 degree field of view at 30 frames per second, sucking up as many as 200 miles of city scenes per day. 

So far Immersive’s cameras have logged more than 50,000 miles across the United States, providing Google with most of the images for cities that offer Street View (the Web giant did San Francisco, for example, in-house). “Our goal with Street View is to provide users with a rich, immersive browsing experience,” insists Megan Quinn, a Google spokesperson. Going forward, the Google Maps team hopes to make the new feature available in as many cities as possible. “Our users have told us that this ability to view a location as if they were actually there helps them better understand and find information about places they live and visit,” Quinn continues. 

Here is a cool interactive raw video of a drive through Manhattan. Users look at the high resolution image in any direction. Click on the movie when it plays and drag the mouse to experience a 360 degree view.