This way you know whether a Street View car will visit you soon

From June 22, Google Street View cars will be driving in Germany again to ensure that the villages, towns and everything in between are up-to-date again. Streetview was quite a problem in Germany, because many people didn’t want to know about it for privacy reasons. Now, 13 years later, Google is going to do it again after an investigation with a positive result: putting Germany on the sensitive plate. What about the Street View cars, when are they on the road?

Maps with details

Google Maps is very useful: you can easily navigate to a place with it. However, if you want a little more detail, to see where you stand, you can switch to Google Street View. You then literally see photos that have been taken of that particular street or building, which helps you to find your way better, but also, for example, to better estimate whether you want to live in a certain neighborhood or even, if you no longer know how a certain store is called but where it is, to look up the name of that place where they sold those delicious bonbons.

Google’s Street View is already 15 years old and in that time it has done an extreme amount. It has taken more than 220 billion Street View photos in more than 100 countries. In this way, a fairly clear 360-degree map of the Earth has been created. In the meantime, however, Google has a new camera for its Street View cars. This makes it possible to capture special places, such as the Arabian desert and Antarctica.

New camera

The new camera will be released next year and it must take high-quality images. In addition, it is much smaller, making it more portable and even better at capturing everything in the world, including mountain tops. The new camera weighs less than 7 kilograms and, among other things, lidar can be used to record road markings, for example. In addition, and that is an advantage for Google, the camera can be placed on any car. In this way, Google hopes to move towards a more sustainable fleet.

Google Street View is a special project. It is free to use, while a lot of money is invested in it. Moreover, it has already solved some special cases, such as the disappearance of an elderly woman from Belgium, but at the same time it also ensures that, for example, a bank robber can more easily plan his escape route: so it works both ways. In addition, it is also often a source of entertainment: some children like to lie ‘dead’ on the image, or just wave. It’s also nice to visit your own house and see if, for example, your cat is lying in front of the window. There are many fun things to do with Street View.

Street View car near you

Do you want to know when there is such a car in your area? That’s possible, you can see on this site when and where the Google cars will soon be driving in the Netherlands. At least, it is a fairly broad concept: you only see the months that they drive in a certain region and that is half a year. Unfortunately, there is no possibility to get more information, which is a pity on the one hand, but understandable on the other hand: otherwise people would go crazy over the photos, instead of it being a serious medium to look up important information.

Laura Jenny

When she’s not tapping, she’s traveling around the wonderful world of entertainment or some cool place in the real world. Mario is the man of her life,…