All the Ways Google Gets Street View Images

[Narrator] 102 countries, seven continents,

10 million miles of road.

In 15 years,

Google Street View has circled the planet 400 times.

Here you can see where we've mounted the Street View car

onto a three-wheel tricycle.

Here it's been mounted to a snowmobile.

One of our earliest trackers.

A trolley through museums.

Places that we expect that are to be a lot of change,

we try to drive those areas more frequently.

There are other areas of the world where we still

have to go back and refresh that imagery again.

[Narrator] Let's walk through 15 years of gadgets and gear

to understand the tools Google Street View uses

to map the world.

Maps are fundamentally about where things are.

Think about a satellite map, or even the map

that you draw on a napkin for your friend.

You're talking about where things are

and where they are in relation to each other.

[Narrator] And in that sense, Street View was different.

It promised an immersive on-the-ground experience

of far-flung locals.

Street View was the brainchild

of Google co-founder, Larry Page.

He had what was a pretty crazy idea at the time

that you should enable people to explore the world right

from their computers.

He actually collected the first Street View imagery.

He used a camcorder and drove around the streets

around the Google office and brought this back

for the engineers to play with.

And the engineers built a custom prototype camera system

that had multiple camera units and multiple laser scanners.

The whole thing weighed 500 pounds.

The team used this to collect imagery around the Bay Area.

The very first version, which had a small

four megapixel camera, it just took pictures

and we had to figure out exactly

where these pictures were taken using a GPS unit

that followed along with the car.

The idea was how can we stitch this together

into a seamless experience that can let people

explore the world.

The lights turned on for Street View in may of 2007.

That was when we had the first consumer-facing release

with five Street View cities worth of imagery collected.

[Narrator] San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami,

and Denver were the first, but the project expanded,

covering more countries and thousands of miles of streets,

all using pretty much the same underlying process.

At the most basic level, it's all about collecting imagery

of the world and processing this into one seamless model.

A Street View car starts as a regular car

that you could buy.

We mount a custom roof rack onto the top

and then the camera gets mounted on a mast

that can be raised and lowered.

The Street View camera has seven lenses

and it takes full 360-degree panoramic shot

a couple times a second, so you'd be able to traverse

the length of a road from picture to picture to picture,

using a technique called photogrammetry,

which is a really old technique, actually from the 1800s.

You can take measurements from photos

and you can basically figure out where objects are,

how big they are, how far apart they are.

There's a cable that comes off the camera system

and goes into the backseat where it connects

to the processing system and the hard drives

for storing all of the imagery data.

In the back, there were boxes of CPUs and hard drives

in them that would collect all of the data.

This typically took up a big portion

of the backseat of the car and it's getting stored

on, basically, on the hard disk.

This information is sent in batch

and then it's fed into our imagery processing pipelines.

The cameras themselves have gotten much better.

Not only have they gotten higher resolution,

going from 4.8 megapixels, to a 45 megapixel camera,

75, up to 140 megapixels.

Their responsiveness in low light is much better.

[Narrator] Apart from improvements in the cameras,

the game-changing tech to the Street View system

was the addition of LIDAR scanners,

first in 2008 and updated in 2013.

The LIDAR works with, you know, millimeter accuracy.

They're laser radars.

They have invisible laser beams

that shoot out and map the world in 3D,

as the car moves down the street.

So it helps us measure where the curbs are, or even

where there are lines of paint in the middle of the road.

All this information comes back

and helps us build this very precise, highly detailed

3D reconstruction of the world.

Every route is planned in advance.

This is actually important from a privacy perspective.

We try to standardize our Google Street View hardware

as much as possible, but sometimes there are local quirks

that mean we have to introduce something

a little bit different.

This is our main car that we use in North America

and the mast on top of the car is pretty tall.

This is so the camera can see over parked cars

that might be on the side of the street.

When we first took this car to Japan, we ran into a problem.

The streets are very narrow and oftentimes,

people put up fences in front of their yard

so that their yard won't be visible from the street

and we discovered that the Street View camera

was actually seeing over these fences into people's yards.

So we came up with a custom rig for the Japan market

and you can see that this car has a much lower mast.

[Narrator] Another milestone expansion of the program

was tracker gear, which took image-gathering

off road in 2012.

We realized that there were so many important places

on earth where you simply couldn't drive a car.

Even in a city, there are narrow alleys,

there are pedestrian walking pads.

We'd like to take you inside transit stations,

or maybe even inside a museum, or out into the wilderness,

to the top of Machupicchu, and the top of Mont Blanc,

down into the Amazon rainforests,

and underwater by the Great Barrier Reef,

or up in the International Space Station.

The Street View tracker is basically

a Street View camera system that's attached to a backpack.

Here you can see the camera unit on top with the lenses.

Here you can see a GPS unit

and these are our laser scanners.

This is the processing unit.

And what you see on the back here is a big heat sink

because it takes a lot of processing to handle

all this imagery and the unit can get hot.

You actually put this on, wearing the straps.

It's relatively comfortable to wear.

But, you know, it's not the lightest thing,

weighing in at about 35 pounds.

You can just walk naturally and it will automatically

snap photos as you're walking down the path.

You can be tipping from side to side

and you don't want the pictures to come out blurry.

So we use a lot of smart software algorithms.

[Narrator] The typical trucker outing takes a few hours,

unless it's a hike down into the Grand Canyon.

That'll take a tracker 10 days.

Google collects this imagery themselves

through staff trackers,

through a network of third-party contractors,

or by tapping a community of contributors

who use their own 360 cameras.

My favorite story about the Street View tracker

is about the Faroe Islands.

Some enterprising folks who live there,

they wanted the Faroe Islands to be on Street View as well.

We actually sent them the Street View equipment

and they used sheep to carry the Street View camera

around Sheep view.

One thing that we tried was putting high-definition cameras

that were facing to the sides, so we could read

small print that was on the store fronts of businesses.

Think about opening hours that are on the door

of a business, that it's really hard to see from the street.

[Narrator] This side profile camera configuration

was paired with machine learning

and image recognition software,

which was already in Google's wheelhouse.

The engineers who first worked on this project

had actually been working on

the Google Books search project.

They were experts in processing imagery

and the book search project was trying to digitize

all the world's books in libraries.

So these people knew how to work with imagery.

And at first, we had humans looking at this imagery,

combined with thousands of other data sources

in order to build the roads and the business listings

that you see on Google Maps.

But the world is a really big place, so it wasn't too long

before we started introducing machine learning

to look at the images and automatically extract information.

Blurring and privacy protection

has been built in pretty much from the start.

This is a process that's fully automatic.

All of the people's faces, all the license plates,

these are blurred through automatic algorithms

because, otherwise, the scale of processing this with humans

would just be too great.

[Narrator] Recently, Google unveiled for us

the latest camera, set to roll out on Street View cars

over the next year.

Our current generation cameras,

they're designed for specific models of car

that need to have a custom roof rack.

With this, we can send it around the world.

It has handles to make it easy to pick up.

The whole thing weighs less than 15 pounds.

And one of the key things about this

is it can be mounted on top of any vehicle at all.

We can give it to a third-party

and they can put it on any car that has a roof rack.

There are seven lenses arranged around the outside

and one that's pointing upwards from the top.

As the camera moves down the street,

or on top of a backpack,

it takes a full 360-degree panorama.

These are heat sinks.

We've taken all of the processing power

that used to take up the entire backseat of a car

and we've shrunk it down and we've stuck it inside

the camera unit, so this is all you need

in order to go collect Street View imagery.

[Narrator] Google is innovating on the software side, too,

with Immersive View.

We launched Immersive View, which is all of the billions

of Street View images and aerial photos.

Let's say, you're planning a trip to London.

We can take you to Westminster and you can see

where's Big Ben, and where's the London Eye,

and where are they in relation to each other.

We can then overlay additional information

on top of this model of the world.

If you wanna see what it looks like with the sun coming

from one direction or the sun coming from another direction,

using all of this imagery that we've collected,

we can actually put these experiences

into what we've collected from Street View.

And when you're ready to choose a restaurant,

we can fly you down to street level and show you

real-time busyness and these future, rich, immersive

experiences, this is what Street View will be empowering.

And hopefully it's helped people learn more

about places around the world,

about other people's communities,

and about their fellow citizens.