Google Street View 3D

Funny, but not sure if it’s an April Fools joke. Just looking at some Street View imagery, when I noticed a little orange guy with 3D glasses right underneath the controls, as can be seen to the right. Turns out that when you click it, it will show you the imagery in — yeah, you guessed that right — 3D. You do need a pair of those red/green 3D glasses though. Which of course, I don’t have. That figures…

So, unfortunately I can’t try it out right now, but if you do happen to have some 3D glasses laying around, you could, for instance, have a look at the entrance of the Efteling, which is a theme park a few kilometers from here. I have no idea how extensive this 3D coverage is, but it might just be available everywhere, just some feature Google’s camera cars have had since the beginning but they just haven’t told us about. Anyway, I didn’t do an extensive search, but I have yet to discover a Street View area that hasn’t got 3D imagery.

Next up on my todo list: fashion some 3D glasses somehow, or just get a pair somewhere.

Update (April 9th, 2010)

Apparently, it was just an April Fools joke after all. The option is now gone.

I knew Google was busy in the Netherlands, they already have Street View for Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Groningen available. And they’re also photographing touristic attractions by bicycle right now. What I didn’t know is that they are actually photographing smaller municipalities. Oosterhout is relatively small, it has just over 50,000 inhabitants.

It’ll probably be a couple of months before the pictures are online, but it’d be nice to be able to see my home with Street View, or show it to others. I may even find myself (or my taxi anyway) in one of those pictures.

Update (November 12, 2009)

Apparently, Google hasn’t really done my home town, just the freeways and a couple of local streets. Either that, or they still have to process the photos. In any case, Breda, the nearest larger city, is now extensively covered in Street View. You can use the link above and zoom out a bit to see what’s covered in my neighborhood (drag out the little orange figure above the zoom bar; covered streets get a blue outline).

Update (March 12, 2010)

Google has been busy again. Pretty much whole of the Netherlands is now covered, including my home town. I can now virtually visit my own home.

Klup.nl is a Dutch web site for people looking for a house. It apparently once posted some text about a car dealer named Zwartepoorte, and somewhere on the same page, another text about the bankruptcy of a totally different company. The two texts had nothing to do with each other, nor did it appear that way on the web site.

Google, in their everlasting effort to index everything, crawled the page with the mentioned texts, and generated an unfortunate summary for the page that suggested that the car dealer was bankrupt. This summary was shown when searching for “Zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet meaning bankrupt in Dutch). It appeared beneath the link to to said page on Klup.nl in the search results (you know, those grey summaries we all see every day). The summary goes as follows:

volledige naam: Zwartepoorte specialiteit BMW…Dit bedrijf is failliet verklaard, het is overgenomen door het motorhuis (…)

Literally translated: “full name: Zwartepoorte specialty BMW…This company has been declared bankrupt, it has been acquired by the motor house (…)”.

So far, there’s nothing wrong. Until John Zwartepoorte, CEO of the car dealer, used the query mentioned above on Google, and found the summary suggesting his company was bankrupt. So he sued Klup.nl, the site that originally posted both texts.

Weird, you think? Well, not according to the judge. He made a consideration between the right of free speech (don’t ask me what free speech has to do with Google botching up some text) and the interests of Zwartepoorte, and ruled ¹ that Klup.nl was indeed responsible for Google’s summary.

That’s not all, though. Free speech is a constitutional right in the Netherlands, and it has always been very liberal, there weren’t many things one couldn’t say. Discrimination and slander are some of the few things that do not fall under free speech. This judge now added to that, than whenever Google pulls things out of context, the original text must be adjusted. Rather futile, I might add, because there’s no knowing what kind of summary Google will generate for the new text on its next crawl.

Well, luckily there’s the possibility of appeal, which the owner of Klup.nl is of course pursuing. But as it is, until the appeal has been treated in court, this verdict stands. Let’s just hope Google doesn’t generate any “unfortunate” summaries of my site…

1. This page is in Dutch, here’s a translation by Google.

Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/

Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:

Google with lights off

So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.

For those using a localized version of Google, this is what google.com looks like now:

Google front page

Or you could go to google.com/ncr to see it yourself (this link prevents redirecting to your localized Google version).