In the beginning the fascination on Google Earth was enourmous. Finally a way to watch the globe online without need of a special offline map software. Watch every city, every street, every acre of land from top. And now, Google goes the next step – the Street view feature. It is simple. A car with a special camera array on the top drives through the streets and takes an 360° capture of it. Every street, every few metres. In the U.S. it’s quite far developed but now they already work on the european cities aswell some other international ones. Especially in Germany the opposition is quite strong. People are not satisfied with promises of Google like “we will blur out licence tags and people’s faces and so on”. They simply don’t want Streetview of their city/country.

Now while i’m working on my new gallery again I check the maps of some locations. I still remember the exact location just not the name of the street. Just because of a small coincidence I realized, that Streetview is available on Hong Kong aswell by now. First I was pretty fascinated by going through all the streets I can still remember like the Peel Street, the Nathan Road or the Des Voeux Road

Even though I was amused by “gliding” through HK Streetview, but I remembered the discussion in Germany again awell. Is it nescessary to do that? Why is Google so keen of doing that? Is it really for the good of all? Not really I think. Unfortunatelly that conflicts with my NUlm3D Project. What’s the difference in having Streetview nobody in Germany really likes to have and selfmade 3D models representing buildings in your own town? Besides that, a recent incident revealed, that they have been collecting private WLAN information in Germany aswell. Since lack of time was a factor keeping me away from that project, the increasing criticism on Streetview won’t make it any better. Soon or later they find out and start to complain about that aswell.

As you can see, it’s the Peel Street with it’s distinctive tree in that wall. The perspective isn’t quite identical because actually I have taken my image from the bridge of the Escalator route