The workstation paragraph seems like a humble brag. Most of us yearn for a set-up like that! Especially with the price of components going up thanks to AI and corporations buying all the hardware to support it.
Google Street View in 2026
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#42Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision. By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and…
You can do that with Google Earth VR. It’s actually really cool in VR. You feel like Godzilla. Unfortunately it’s only a small subsets of major cities and the implementation feels so half-baked it could have been an AWS service. But it’s still a cool tech demo nonetheless.
No, you can't. Google Earth VR is indeed awesome (I am biased because I was involved in its creation), however there is no seamless integration between Street View and satellite view, and no free camera motion or even stereo rendering support for Street View in Google Earth VR. Google Earth VR was essentially abandoned and hasn't been updated at all since 2018, as can be seen in its Steam listing. This is due to the sad failure of the Daydream team.
Finally there is a glimmer of hope now that Android XR is happening. There is a new version of Google Maps for Android XR that does finally have a 3D reconstruction feature for Street View, but only for building interiors. Hopefully it won't be abandoned this time!
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#43The workstation paragraph seems like a humble brag. Most of us yearn for a set-up like that! Especially with the price of components going up thanks to AI and corporations buying all the hardware to support it.
It is a humble brag. I saw the specs and thought the author would discuss different approaches of finessing the data and a benchmark. There isn’t one. So it’s indeed a humblebrag.
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#44Tangential comment but I still don't understand how we have technology to identify a car license plate from space but we have pixelated images from Antarctica on Google Maps / Google Earth. Why not publish that and make it accessible? Is it true that Antarctica is not easy to scan due to ice and snow?
Google Maps' high-resolution "satellite" imagery is actually captured from planes.
Antarctica is huge (1.5x the area of the US), it would be a dangerous logistical nightmare to fly the sorts of patterns you need to capture aerial imagery there, and it's almost entirely covered in non-descript ice -- what would be the value of having high-resolution imagery there?
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you describe seems to have been implemented in Google Earth. It seems like an intentional product choice to do it in Google Earth and not Google Maps. Most people use Google Maps to get directions and reviews of places, and very few people I know even use the street view feature.
Google Earth and Google Maps 3D satellite view on desktop web have essentially the same rendering of Street View, which hasn't materially changed in 10 years or more and does not have the features I described. Google Maps on mobile never integrated the 3D satellite view at all, which represents another regrettable lack of investment on Google's part. People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to…
Oh I thought the desktop 3D satellite view was powered by combining the regular satellite view and street view. Looks like that’s not the case.
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that it's useful for navigating the real world. You could have way better directions displays that show directions in context instead of just schematically. It would make the petabytes of imagery that has already been collected much more accessible and therefore useful, instead of being relegated to a special clunky Street View mode that is rarely visited. It would enable exploring real spaces in a…
I could see this as an argument for a heads up display. So, good for projecting directions onto a windshield or for having the glasses thing. But this? I don't see how a VR world helps anyone navigate the real world. That is, you seem to be saying the VR data is needed for AR usage. And I just don't see how those are helping each other too much. I'm fully bought off on the "it would be fun" aspect. I don't see a valu…
A heads up display doesn't need a 3D rendering of the environment around it because the environment is already visible through the screen. The 3D rendering is so you can see what to expect before you get there. If you don't understand why that could possibly be useful then I don't know what to tell you; you'll have to take it for granted that some people's brains work differently than yours and can benefit from seeing places they are about to visit in 3D before they get there.
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#47El Salvador looks black but has pretty good coverage throughout the country. Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here. Paraguay too.
Costa Rica and Paraguay coverage was added recently (within the last year iirc). The author notes Paraguay as an example of a country that was not yet in the dataset they sourced from.
El Salvador does have a decent amount of coverage on street view, but this was done by El Salvador Maps (if you pan the camera down, you'll see this name on the cars used to capture the coverage). The dataset is curated by a member of the Geoguessr community, in which "unofficial" coverage like this is disregarded, which is why you won't see it included.
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#48Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision. By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and…
We could be... but why? What's the product?
It makes sense they prototyped it. But putting it into production is $$$, way more expensive than current street view.
Current street view works well enough. How is a massively upgraded 3D version, that is bloated and slower to use on older devices, going to make Google more money?
It feels more like a separate product to license to architecture firms, city planners, video game studios, etc.
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#49Tangential comment but I still don't understand how we have technology to identify a car license plate from space but we have pixelated images from Antarctica on Google Maps / Google Earth. Why not publish that and make it accessible? Is it true that Antarctica is not easy to scan due to ice and snow?
[deleted]
Re: Google Street View in 2026
#50Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision. By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and…
That's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.
[flagged]