Just a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK"

The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.

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.

Yea, I agree. The dataset is < 100MB... so duckdb can very easily handle this on an old macbook air.

https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data

Seems like he ran out of money to get a good GPU though :)

The author is known for deep dives on data sets like that (I'm following him on Linkedin for that), so makes sense they always mention their setup even if it doesn't apply to his specific data set.

Not sure this is the reason but: it is generally not easy to get a satellite over the poles. You launch close to the equator in the direction of Earth's spin to take advantage of the (very substantial!) speed you already have due to the rotation of the planet. Getting from an equatorial orbit to a polar one requires a huge amount of fuel / energy. You can't just sort of "drive it over".

Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program

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?

Pretty sure the license plate/street view level data is from the cars that drive around with a lidar thing strapped to the top, not satellite data

I wonder if we just don't have many of these types of satellites in a polar orbit, since we don't have as big a need for that type of imagery for the poles?

> we have technology to identify a car license plate from space

We don't. State of the art imaging satellites are in ballpark of 20cm/px.

Here is what antarctica looks from a satellite: https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/satellite-image...

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.

Oh wow I hadn’t noticed that. It’s especially noticeable when “walking” down the street between points.

I’m so glad to finally have that feature in my area. It was the one thing I missed from Google Maps which I otherwise avoid.

I can see the value of it, certainly, but it's also probably Google's creepiest product. The street where I live, you can see inside peoples kitchens and living rooms on Street View. I had to ask Google twice to block my house, because they fucked it up the first time.

An unusually dense road network?

edit: This page has some data: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Landscape-metrics-for-ro...

Southern Ontario has 4x the road density of the province average, so might be a contributing factor?

That whole part of Ontario is basically farms with long straight concession roads so I imagine you could cover a lot of area quite quickly just driving in a straight line for a couple hours, turning driving 2 km then turning and driving straight for a couple hours on repeat.

The UX of Google Maps is abysmal even if you don't consider the 3D effects.

"The darker colours are points that were updated closer to 2007 and the brighter colours closer to December of last year." It's possible that this area was just more recently updated and is not necessarily more densely covered compared to other areas.

> it'll be a shame when it's inevitably enshitified

Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.

The high-res imagery on Google Earth mostly comes from aerial surveys, not satellite. If it's not economically worth flying a plane back and forth to survey -- and that's certainly true in Antarctica -- that's when you get the fuzzy civilian-grade satellite imagery or some cheap/public-domain out-of-date aerial photography.

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.

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 access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view and directions then it would see much more usage.

There's arguments to be made that it could be better, to be sure, but I also remember when GPS driving directions were dedicated devices and you had to pay a few hundred bucks a year to get updated maps. For such an expensive product, it wasn't any better in many regards.

I'm rather happy Google maps exists and can't complain too much about using it for free.

I think it's the same tech they use to make the "3d" background photos on the iPhone wallpaper, which is probably also the same tech used for inferring depth when converting a normal photo to a spatial photo for viewing on an AVP.

I just wish Apple would add more streets. London is the closest place with Apple “street view” to me and there are literally a couple of cities (!!!) between me and London. So I don’t hold any hope that Apple will ever get round to coming to my small village if there are entire cities they’ve left out.

I love this and share the experience! It is a very cool effect, specially when moving through the street.

> By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction

Right and if they did you'd likely be complaining about how they ruined Street View by making it a slow bloated mess and should have left it alone.

Knowing Google’s tendency to kill things they try and fail to revamp, I’ll take this stagnation as long as they keep updating it with new imagery. Street View is the greatest project in human historiography; there’s too much to lose to silly Google management.

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.

We need an open version (as OpenStreetMap is to Google Maps).

Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/) has surprisingly good coverage in some places, but the experience is lacking, partly because most of the images (where I've looked) aren't 360 views.

That's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.

On Android they've actually rolled out the 3D view in Maps recently! Took them long enough. I now have an "aerial" button in the bottom left corner when viewing Street View imagery that switches between the two.

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.

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.

While I agree something like this sounds really neat, I am curious what the value proposition is? Pointedly, is it any higher than doing the same thing in a video game in a fantasy world?

I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.

I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.

You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.

Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.

So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.

Sounds awesome, is there a video of it I could watch somewhere?

Edit: for those who didn't know, like me, apple's maps are available at https://maps.apple.com. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have

Drag two fingers on the map and you'll bring the camera down to see the 3D effect more clearly.

Mapquest existed before Google maps. Google maps main advantage was streetview, but if Google maps stopped existing we wouldn’t go back to proprietary closed mapping solutions. That’s silly.

I think about this so often. Google Street View and YouTube are full of irreplaceable information. At least it's not Meta, but apart from them it could hardly be in less reliable hands.

Absolutely. Imagine being able to look at 100 years of street view history, or several hundred, at some point in the future.

By selling virtual billboards within the street view

Google mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Panoramax[0] is another, perhaps more open option, though it is currently primarily used in Europe.

[0] panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/

Mapillary is of course owned by Meta these days.

No it's not.

Is this actually open source? The few datasets I found on there are under non-commercial licenses.

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!

It's very cool but I don't understand why they've decided to basically not do it in the US and UK.

Meanwhile they have nearly full coverage of the rest of western Europe, plus a huge amount of Canada and Mexico.

https://i.imgur.com/ZPTozti.png

This was launched in 2019. A few years ago I remember speculating that they were holding it back with the cool 3D effects to do a big push alongside Vision Pro, but that's come and gone with no significant change to Look Around.

California isn't doing bad, but outside of that they're averaging about 0.5 locations per state.

They haven't been to Nashville but they sent someone to drive to Rainbow Lake, Alberta? What gives?

A more accurate, 3D mapped street view could probably allow GPS-less geolocation and could also help autonomous vehicles as they would get more information than what they can immediately see.

I could see well-mapped street view with good services built around it, and maybe a way to pay for and schedule regular updates, being used for towns to monitor public space long term too.

I think many things could be built on a better street view, but I also don't want Google to get yet another de facto monopoly in a new domain.

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 way that provides much better spatial context, to build a spatial memory that helps your navigation when you get to the real place. And yes, it would be fun. At one time, Google was into that sort of thing.

Oh cool, I didn't know they added their Street View equivalent to the web version. The animated transitions are much better than Google's.

Was leetcode-style interviewing not a thing before that? Cracking the coding interview was published in 2008 so I would assume it was already quite established by then.

Does it appear only if you visit the website on mobile? I don't see any street view option when I visit that site on a PC.

Oh that’s right, I always forget they have it on the web.

For my life, I don't understand the gestures for the 3D map. It would seem that I can ONLY manipulate that view by accident.

Mission statements are only there to resonate with people, so that part is working. If the mission doesn't make money, they aren't gonna do it just because it matches a statement

>could also help autonomous vehicles as they would get more information than what they can immediately see.

Waymo and others already do this, that's why they can only operate in mapped areas.

Given that Waymo is a google company, they almost certainly started with street view data.

Google maps has two different versions of this. One of them has a step by step series of street view images and the other does a full animated fly through of every street. The second one may be web only.

This already exists. If my phone fails to get a good GPS signal Google Maps prompts me to turn the camera on and spin around in a circle. I would also be unsurprised to learn Waymo uses Street View

Reading a map isn't that hard. It just sounds like an elaborate way to illustrate navigation with crayons. A cool product demo, but not very useful in practice.

My first job, in California, was just transitioning to leetcode-style interviews in 2007 following the industry trend. So it was probably spreading around that time.

It does look smooth but for me the killer feature on google maps is still the ability to go back in time.

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 value proposition for it, though.

I would argue that back then leetcode-style interviews probably filtered for the real talent Google was looking for (and that made possible many things). Then companies started cargo-culting it and people started gaming the system.

They seem to be significantly slower though

I believe so, I can't test now but I don't see it on desktop either.

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.

Apologies, I meant my point to be that navigating a place is more helped with AR techniques than it is VR ones. Which, as you say here, is less helped by 3D rendering than it is other things. Indeed, I meant that to be my point.

Do I think it could be useful if you rehearse navigating a place before getting there? Yeah. Ish. I can see obvious military style value adds for that. Average person, though? I still have a hard time seeing the value.

Reminds me when places were offering video tours of places. Is a neat idea. But ridiculously low in actual value.