Bangalore, India — If you spot a car with a camera on top in front of your house, do not be suspicious, because Google’s infamous ‘Street View’ cars are now intruding the streets of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. Search engine behemoth Google Inc. on Thursday sent a fleet of cars to capture street images it will use to create its online mapping in India, even as the Internet giant is being criticized from several overseas governments for invading privacy.
Searching the name of your favorite coffee house in Delhi’s Connaught Place or Mumbai’s Colaba or Bangalore’s Brigade Road? Well, there will soon be an easy way out. With the click of a mouse, you can virtually roam the locality and locate the shop that slipped out of your memory.
The country of more than one billion people will soon be able to tap in to a local address and see a panoramic view of the area. Google Street View is a useful application for getting to know your neighborhood without actually being there, and yesterday, Google announced that they are bringing their camera cars to Bangalore, India.
The Street View feature started in the U.S. back in 2007 and has since expanded to 27 countries, including UK, Singapore and Australia, with South Africa and Japan among them, is basically an 360 degree imagery collection of various locations and takes Google Maps to a new level. The feature is already available in 27 countries. India is uncharted territory for Google’s eye, and the project is underway.
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The search engine giant in its latest expansion for a service that already exists in more than 25 countries around the world took the first step of putting its camera-mounted cars on Bangalore roads to capture images of landmarks. To access narrow and uneven roads, Google employs a trike, a camera-mounted modified bicycle.
In India, Street View will initially be launched in Bangalore and then moved on to other cities and states. “Bangalore being the IT capital of India was the obvious choice to start with. The aim is to map India in totality which is a tough job considering two-third streets in India do not have names,” said Vinay Goel, country head, products, Google.
Google explained that Street View is not only handy for residents of India but also for anyone who wants to see what the streets are like there. “It will be as good as walking down the street from the comfort of your desktop or mobile device,” the company said in a statement.
Moreover, the captured images will be processed and stitched for a 360-degree view before they are attached to Google Maps. To use Street View, log into Google Map, click and place “the pegman” on the street you want to visit. And what you get is a high-resolution, near-life panoramic view of the location.
Areas where driving a car is not possible, this new venture will see the ongoing adventures of the Google Trike (see video below). This three-wheeled pedi-cab with a camera system mounted on top or a rickshaw to put it simply — will be used to collect images.
In Bangalore, Google’s Street View will be accumulating images from various locations beginning with Nrityagram Dance Village. These images once upload on the net will be useful for urban development planners, house-hunters and travelers. Users can check parking slots before arriving at a place, arrange meeting points. Businesses can also benefit from the Street View technology by embedding Google Maps directly into their site.
Previous country where the trike have been used is the Colosseum in Rome and Stonehenge in the United Kingdom.
In a bid to dispel privacy concerns, Goel said only photographs of public places will be taken. “These images are no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down the street.”
“Street View is designed to comply with all local laws including those related to security and privacy in India,” Google India chief Goel told reporters in Bangalore.
“As an additional privacy protection measure, the faces and number plates of vehicles seen in the photographs will be blurred,” he said. “If there are concerns still, the user can report the same by clicking on ‘report a problem’ button located on the bottom-right corner of Street View image. Once the claim is verified, the image is removed.”
Nevertheless, Google Street View has a history of strange and amusing sights. And, learning from its experience in US, where the concept came under controversy because of privacy issue, Google blurs human faces and license plates of vehicles to render them unidentifiable. In case there is a request from a user for additional blurring of images, the matter will be looked into by the company, said Goel.
Goel declined to give details about Google’s plans to expand the project across India, where cities and villages are often a chaotic jumble of traffic jams, buffalo carts and shanty towns. Either way, this is a good step forward. Google Street View is probably more reliable than most travel sites for getting honest images.