Google recently went through an upgrade on their maps section found at maps.google.com. If you go to one of these 5 cities (New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Denver or Miami) you can now get images at street level which you can see in a 360 degree perspective. I guess this is Googles attempt to catch up with the cool Virtual Earth by MSN who have better 3D models on their earth application. Looking around the street level images I find that they actually are very good and do add a great perspective on what you search for on the maps site.
To complete the task of getting all the images, google had teams drive around every street for a year. The vehicle had cameras mounted on it which could capture the unique 3D scene and then they were stitched together to work in Google Maps. The company who provided this was Immersive Media.
I do hope they expand to more then just the 5 main cities. No doubt this will happen eventually, but hopefully it isnt too far away.
Via: OhGizmo
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