'Burgh goes virtual on Google - Pittsburgh on Street View

[RamboLiberal]

Smile, Pittsburgh -- you're on Google-vision.

Starting today, Pittsburgh joins the list of 14 cities that Internet users can tour online by using Google Maps' Street View. The service, which launched in May, offers three-dimensional, photographic views of cityscapes that a user can navigate street by street to locate everything from apartments to gas stations to theaters.

With Street View, dragging and dropping the icon of a human figure onto a highlighted street will pull up a photo of the street, placing the user in a virtual world in which it is possible to move forward, backward, to the side -- even to rotate 360 degrees.

Street View is not, as some might fear, real-time video. Pulling up a view of Downtown will not show people walking down Smithfield Street -- the "Simpsons" episode in which Marge Simpson accidentally spies a naked Homer on a hammock got it wrong.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07282/823985-96.stm

[tech3149]

1. Thanks for that, it was nice to take a stroll around my old school

Broad St, Penn Av, and Shadyside without burning up a few gallons of gas.

[JPZenger]

2. Philadelphia is now also on Street View

Philadelphia is also on Google Street View. Unfortunately, the street views are often blurry.

My favorite geography site is the MSN site that provides 45 degree aerial photos of San Francisco and New York City and immediately adjacent areas. You can see much more at an angle that just looking at rooftops.

[FREEWILL56]

3. Thanks for the link as I can go right to my door.

There are some limitations built into the program like blowing the image up further than they allow or being able to copy the pic of the place you're at.