Helvetica 'Foofers' Bold - You Oughtta be in Pixels

09:37 am - You Oughtta be in Pixels

Me in the Google Maps Street View

One afternoon last summer when I was out to get a soda or go to Darth Paul or something, I remember this unassuming car coming around the corner with an aluminum and PVC contraption strapped to the roof which I surmised was a panoramic camera. Although there was no signage on the car to indicate its origins, I figured there was a good chance it was from the Google Street View project (though I’d always pictured they’d be in ominous black vans or something), and so maybe once a month or so since then, whenever I happened to be using Google Maps and remembered, I would check that spot and see if Street View maps were available for the area yet. Well, as of this morning, there it is (along with nearly all of the metropolitan bay area)!

And no, I’m not picking my nose or using a cel phone. I was peering over the tops of my sunglasses with a “is that what I think it is?” stare.

This amuses me greatly. Over a quarter century ago, a bit on Nova or some other science program about the Aspen Movie Map is one of the key things that got me fired up about computers, graphics and interaction design. At the scale Google has taken it to, the storage, bandwidth and computational requirements just break my old man brain, and now there I am gawking like a yokel for everyone to see.