Google Street View Delivers Road Trips Through 5 Calif. National Parks

**ZemaTalon** · 07-30-2012, 01:32 PM

“Everyone likes to take a road trip through a national park,” said Evan Rapoport, the Street View project manager, who was inspired by a cross-country camping trip he took after graduation. “Bringing unique places to people that they might not go in the real world is unique to Street View.”

The company sought permission from the Department of the Interior before filming in May as drivers hit the road in vehicles rigged with 15-lens cameras that point in all directions, Rapoport said. The camera fires off still images at intervals depending upon the speed of the vehicle, then custom software blurs faces and stitches all of them together into an ever-advancing 360-degree panorama.

Click right and see orange-hued boulders formed from cooling magma. Click up and squint into that fireball of a sun hovering over the southeast California desert in Joshua Tree National Park, which is featured with the others along with the forest-dense Sequoia & Kings Canyon and Redwood National Park at Crescent City near the Oregon border.

Stop in the middle of the virtual road and do a 360 without worrying about being rear-ended by a ubiquitous RV.

Read the rest at The Washington Post, and find links following the article.

**MSUredux** · 07-30-2012, 02:51 PM

I wonder why they had to get permission to film on a public road in a public park. They didn't have to get permission to go past my house, filming private property on a dead end road.

**ZemaTalon** · 07-30-2012, 04:01 PM

Yeah I wondered about that too. I saw a Google car in person for the first time recently on the freeway. I'd heard that they used trucks or vans for that, but this was just an ordinary little economy car with a tall tripod on the roof.

**MSUredux** · 07-30-2012, 04:15 PM

Maybe the vehicle used depends on where they are filming. I saw one twice. Both times it was a little economy car.

**Grogan** · 07-30-2012, 05:11 PM

They are probably covering their asses, because small minded people in positions of authority have kicked people out of national parks for filming. It's been in the news (or internet tabloids at least, if news is too strong a word for it)