Photographing the world ground up

A description of the Google Street View Project is provided, from the beginnings to its current state. Google Street View is perhaps the largest image data base ever collected. The goal of this project is to take panoramic images at every public place in this world and to make these images accessible through the Internet, so that people can "tele-port" themselves to anywhere, anytime. While the general idea behind Street View can be traced back to the MIT Movie Maps project that photographed major roads in Aspen in the late 1960s, a project of this sale and proportion has never been tried before. Many of the issues that arose in building up a fleet of vehicles, and processing endless pedabytes of image data in endless Google computer racks are reviewed. In addition, some of the implications of this new database, and key challenges in moving ahead are discussed.