GOOGLE STREET VIEW

PHOTOGRAPHS OF SKELMORLIE and

WEMYSS BAY
NOW ONLINE
The Google 'Street View' technology, used in 'Google Maps' and 'Google Earth' and providing
panoramic views from various positions along streets and roads around The World, was
launched on May 25, 2007 and on, March 11, 2010, over 99% of the United Kingdom's
roads, covering a total of approximately 238,000 miles, both rural and urban, were added.

The peculiar advantage of the new technology is that one can now see, at least from a nearby
roadway, the whole area around many of the rural locations, before setting out to explore
any 'local features' and also enabling one to make some reasonable assessment of the
difficulties of reaching some of the seldom-visited parts of the area and the technology vastly
adds to the understanding of the locations from the links given in the 80-page long "Kintyre
and The Kintyre Way Linked to Geograph Photographs and Google Maps" document
which can be found online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/16932276/Kintyre-and-the-Kintyre-
Way-Linked-to-Geograph-Photographs-and-Google-Maps

Google 'Street View' technology is indeed something of a 'double-edged sword' and, for many
different reasons, though it will delight some, it will also appall others, some of whom will
argue that it breaches their 'privacy rights' !

'Street View' provides a unique view of 'the way we were' round about 2007 - 2009 and gives
us an extra-ordinarily comprehensive look at places we live, places we grew up in, places
that our family and friends live in, places that we like to visit and places that, having seen
them, we will never visit ! But beware ! Users of dial-up internet connections will find that
the pictures may be slow to load and slow to respond.

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The images have been taken from a fleet of specially adapted cars, each car fitted with nine
directional cameras, for 360° views, positioned at a height of about 2.5 metres above the
road, the cars fitted with GPS units for positioning and three 180° 'panoramic' laser range
scanners for the measuring of up to 50 metres in the front of the cars and the patented 11
lens camera system simultaneously takes photos in 11 directions based on a dodecahedron
geometry

Where available, for not everywhere is covered, the street view images can be accessed after
zooming in to the higher zooming level in Google maps and satellite images, a little yellow
"pegman" icon, on the left hand side of the map,
dragged, by holding down the left mouse button, towards the desired location on the map.

As one drags the "pegman", the Google-filmed roads light up in blue and one simply drags the
"pegman" on to the desired location, so that the little green 'cloud' below the "pegman" sits
on the coloured roadway.

Then, using the computer mouse and the screen controls at the left of the picture, one can
change the horizontal and vertical viewing direction through a full 360°, change the view
upwards or downwards and zoom inwards or outwards.

A straight or broken line in the photo shows the approximate path followed by the camera car
and arrows link to the next photo in each direction, more arrows are shown at junctions and
crossings of camera car routes.

With a little patience and practice, one will discover that, by placing the mouse cursor in the
roadway and, generally, about half-way up the picture, a little, from big-to-narrow, eliptical
'circle' will appear and, by 'double-clicking' on that, one can proceed along the road - If one
goes too far along, one simply turns the view round 180° and goes back to an earlier point !

One can also zoom in to areas of the picture by means of a 'shadowy' rectangular screen
which overlays the area around the cursor, or by 'right-clicking' the computer mouse.

Too, by going to the right of the picture, one can enlarge the pictures to 'full screen' size or
exit the 'Street View' and return to the originally selected Google Map.

Further options, some using 'beta-version' trial tools, can be found by clicking on 'New', at
the top right of the Google Map page.

More about the history etc. of Google's 'Street View' can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View and a World Map of Google's 'Street View'
filming, which, for those with family and friends in America (though Canada is presently
somewhat patchy in coverage), Australia and New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan and much
of Western Europe can be found at http://gmaps-
samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/streetview_landing/streetview-map.html and there is a
'Help' page for Google's 'Street View' at http://www.google.co.uk/help/maps/streetview/

To capture pictures, the Screen Hunter 5.1 Free at http://wisdom-

soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm and, to crop the results, the free Irfanview
program (plus all its necessary add-ons) at http://www.irfanview.com/ will be found 'ever
useful'.

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Google Street View's picture of CalMac's "Bute" arriving at Wemyss Bay