In the 1960's artist Ed Ruscha started documenting the buildings along LA's major boulevards by taking continuous photographs. Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles is now on view in theOverdrive Exhibition at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

If the video above is any guide then the exhibition should prove fascinating. The video compares two continuous pans along Hollywood Boulevard, comparing the street in 1973 and 2002. 

 
Artist Ant Carpendale has taken Street View as the inspiration for his short film The New View You. The film is an interesting look at identity and privacy in the digital age.

 
The ever increasing indoor Street View coverage on Google Maps is leading many companies to become ever more imaginative in how they present themselves on Google Maps. I like this Street View scene created by BDDP Unlimitef.

 
Pursued is a surprisingly fun Street View game from Hungarian independent game developers Nemesys Games.

The game is very simple but no less gripping for that. You are placed into an unnamed location in Google Maps Street View and all you have to do is guess the city. If you can't tell by the visual clues in the Street View you can move around by clicking in the Street View image and by using your '+' and '-' keys to zoom in and out.

If you finish all the pre-programmed levels, you can then make and share your own levels.

Hat-tip: Google Street View World

Courtesy of Huffington Post

The BBC is having its historic - and now sold - TV Centre headquarters in London mapped for posterity by Google Street View.

The search giant has sent in staffers with camera-equipped trailers to capture the sights of the Beeb's famously crumbling halls before the building is handed over to developers Stanhope for good.

An insider told HuffPost that Google was inside the building on Wednesday, to map out certain areas of interest rather than the entire building.

The BBC will lease back some offices from the site, which will be comprehensively redeveloped with flats, offices and shops.

Google has already published pictures from inside Broadcasting House in Central London - their Street View map of the Radio 1 studios went live earlier in February.

Click the picture below to see Google Street View map of the BBC studios.

Here's a selection of the most interesting images.

 Google staffers helping to map 'areas of interest' inside Television Centre.

Radio 1's Live Lounge

Radio 1's Sofa

Radio 1's Control Desk

Radio 1's Desk

Radio 1 Extra Studio

Radio 1 Lounge Window

Radio 1 Servers

Radio 1 Studio

This screenshot from Google Maps taken Tuesday shows North Korean capital Pyongyang mapped in detail. Pic: AP.

Google Maps unveils surprisingly detailed view of the Hermit Kingdom

North Korea is not the unknown land it once was: Defector’s stories are now well-known, photographs and videos from inside the nation are widely spread on the Internet, and the travel industry is expanding all the time. However, the government has kept much tighter controls over its internal details and infrastructure, but that too looks set to change as Google has unveiled its newly detailed map of North Korea.

Previously the Communist country was a literal blank space on the map, dotted only with major cities and county borders. However, as of this morning, Pyongyang is now as detailed as many other world capitals, with parks, streets, museums, and even cinemas now labelled.

The maps are still limited. The further you move away from the Pyongyang the increasingly sparse the plotting becomes. Larger cities, such as Wonsan and Hamhung, feature only landmarks and no road names. It could be said that this is a reflection of the lack of development outside North Korea’s showpiece capital, but more likely it is a symptom of how the new North Korean map was created.

The map is the product of Google’s ‘Map Maker’ tool. This community based tool allows ‘citizen cartographers’ to add and contribute to Google maps. Google’s official site explains: “To build this map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest.” The volunteers act as fact checkers and editors to each other and have been working on this project for several years.

The Map Maker tool is commonly used across Google Maps, but it usually used to build upon or tweak the existing, usually official, country maps. However it the case of North Korea it has very much been built from scratch, and mostly by those outside the country. Google recognises the limitations

“We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place. We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker.”

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the expanded service is the plotting of North Korea’s nuclear facilities and Gulags. The North Korean regime and its official mouthpieces the KCNA and Rodong Sinmun have yet to comment, but it may harm whatever progress and goodwill Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt gained on his recent trip to Pyongyang.

Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, takes photographs as he tours a computer lab at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea earlier this month. Pic: AP.

The maps are of course unlikely to be seen to by the majority of the DPRK’s population. However, it can perhaps be another step towards the demystifying of North Korea, and will now allow many around the globe to catch a glimpse of the nation that is still difficult for most to visit. Google feels it is of particular use to South Koreans looking to understand more about their divided homeland, and perhaps their divided families.

However, it’s not all bad news for North Korea, and they appear to attempting to use the satellite incursion as an opportunity to further spread the word of Kim Jong-Un. The One Free Korea blog reports, a new giant installation reading “Long live Songun Korea’s General Kim Jong Un!” is now visible from space.

Candy Glass Productions has created a nice video explaining how you can make an animated movie from photographs taken in a radius around a building.

 

In their instructions Candy Glass Productions advise you to import a screenshot from Google Maps into Photoshop, and then draw a radius around your selected building. An alternative could be to use the Google Maps API. Esa's Google Maps API Examples has this handy Radius Drawing Toolthat can be used to create a circle around a building on Google Maps. 

 

The advantage of using Esa's radial tool is that you can adjust the radius directly on the map. This allows you to adjust the radius to find the distance from your building that provides the most vantage points for capturing the still photos of your chosen building.

If you want to find the best times for taking your photographs then you can use the Golden Hour Calculator. This Google Maps application displays sunrise and sunset times, the elevation and azimuth of the sun and shows users when the golden hour occurs for any location. The Golden Hour Calculator defines the 'golden hour' as "the first and last hour of sunlight in the day when the special quality of light yields particularly beautiful photographs".

Another great Google Maps based application for photographers is the The Photographer's Ephemeris. This tool helps photographers see how light will fall on the land, day or night, for any location on earth.