Monday, January 04, 2010

A Street View Romance

Street View Love Story

There have been a few attempts to create literary narratives with Google Maps, notably The 21 Steps and Senghor on the Rocks.

So far I have been disappointed that no one has used Street View to help tell a story. Therefore today I decided to make my own very short (and admittedly not very good) story that is illustrated with Street View imagery.

The 21 Steps
The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming is described by Penguin as "an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps." The whole story is told via place marks on a Google Map as the reader follows hero Rick Blackwell in a conspiracy that takes him far away from home.


Senghor on the Rocks

Senghor on the Rocks was 'the first full-length novel consistently illustrated with Google Maps'.

Every page of Senghor on the Rocks is accompanied by a corresponding satellite view of the current location in the story. When the location changes in the novel the map animates the route to the new location. To achieve this the developers created their own extensions to the Google Maps API, such as long-distance panning and a moveable and rotatable arrow on the map that indicates specific locations.

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