Google Street View Appears

Google launched Street View in May 2007 with imagery from a small number of US cities. The feature turned Google Maps from a top-down map into something closer to a navigable photographic model of real streets.

Building it required more than attaching a camera to a car. Multiple images had to be captured with overlapping fields of view, stitched into panoramas, associated with accurate positions and orientations, compressed, and delivered quickly as users moved through the map. Google also had to detect and blur faces and license plates as privacy concerns grew.

Street View later expanded to roads, trails, museums, and remote locations around the world. Its technical legacy is visible in modern mapping and computer vision: large collections of geotagged imagery became useful not only for navigation but also for localization, map maintenance, and training systems to understand the physical world.