Thursday, October 11, 2012

The Biggest Street View Update Yet


Catherine Palace

Google Maps has today announced its biggest Street View update ever, adding over 250,000 miles of panoramic imagery to roads around the world.

New Street View imagery has been rolled out in Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the U.S., Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada. Special Collections of off-road imagery has also been added in South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico.

The Google Lat Long blog has picked out some highlights, including the Catherine Palace and Ferapontov Monastery in Russia, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taiwan, or Stanley Park in Vancouver. You can even walk through the urban jungle of Singapore's Fort Canning Park, without ever leaving home.

There are obviously going to be a lot of surprises in this new release of Street View. In the US I think the Street Views in Six Flags Magic Mountain, Six Flags St Louis, and Kings Island (Cincinnati) are new. In the UK Shepperton Studios and Pinewood Studios now also have Street View.

Time Zones for the Google Maps API

Google has also added today a new Time Zone API to the Google Maps API Web Services. The API returns information about the time zone of any location on earth. The response contains information such as the IANA Time Zone ID, long form name, offset from UTC and any offset due to daylight savings.

Developers can access the API up to 2,500 requests per day, while Google Maps API for Business customers make 100,000 requests. Full documentation is available on the Google Developers website.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I call BS on this article.

Paradise California still has images from 2009 with many roads not even covered.

Paradise California ain't no small town either.

We lived there in the early 90s and it was becoming a traffic nightmare back then as people from Chico were moving up!