Hasta La Gadget!

Street View’s fine for navigation, but we’re sure plenty more people use it just for their armchair tourism. Google has now turned its attention to giving thrill-seekers a chance to gaze out from the top of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Using Trekker backpacks and trolleys, it took the Googlers three days to capture the images from both the viewing gallery on the 124th floor and the window cleaning gantry on the 80th. Curious to experience some of that vertigo for yourself? Video’s after the break.

Filed under: Cameras, GPS, Google

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Via: Official Google Blog

Source: Google Street View

While there are smartphones apps that take some of the hassle out of finding parking, Audi’s bringing similar time- and frustration-saving features to a different screen in your ride, through its Audi Connect infotainment systems. Announced at the Telematics Detroit conference, Audi is tapping Inrix’s parking spot data so you can find car-friendly floor space from within its dashboard navigation platform. After telling the car where you want to go, you’ll have the option to see parking info at the journey’s end, including the nearest locations, operating hours, prices and real-time space availability, depending on what data is available from each garage. The sat-nav will also direct you straight to the entrance of the lot, and should you want to know what that entrance looks like, Google Street View will show you. Audi’s new parking feature should start hitting Connect-equipped cars from today via an OTA update, so the “finding a space was a nightmare” excuse won’t fly next time you’re late. But don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.

Update: Turns out that Inrix gets its data from ParkMe, the makers of the app we link to in the first sentence, which explains why Audi’s new feature is so similar.

Filed under: Transportation, Software

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Source: CNET, Seattle Times

Google’s Street View Trekker has already captured some dramatic scenery in its young life, but we haven’t seen it venture far beyond US borders. The company is making up for that in style through its recently completed image-gathering expedition to the Galapagos Islands. The visit will produce 360-degree shots of 10 representative areas chosen by the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate. There’s more involved than just stunning Google Maps imagery, however: the panoramas will help document any threats to the local climate and wildlife. While we’ll only see the results of the Galapagos trip later this year, it’s good to know that they should help both humans and slow-moving reptiles in equal measure.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Google Official Blog

If you’ve been taking far too many virtual road trips after employing the (unofficial) Street View Hyperlapse chauffeur, you may be running out of places to go next. Well, today Google has added Hungary and Lesotho (a country within South Africa) to the list of lands you can vicariously visit, which brings the total number of Street View-catalogued countries to 50. This being the “largest single update” since, well, the last big one, Google has also added “new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries,” including more places of interest for its special collections, thanks to the Street View trike. So, why venture outdoors this lunchtime, when you can wander the streets of Budapest instead?

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Google Lat-Long Blog

Taking Google’s maps and Street View imagery, design firm Teehan+Lax Labs has moulded them into an unofficial time-lapse animation site. While there’s some predetermined (and beautiful) routes offered up on the maker’s site, you can also plug in your own favorite journeys from A to B — perfect for reliving that milk run. If you’re looking for something a little more aspirational, however, we’ve added a video of one of the lab’s examples after the break.

Filed under: GPS, Internet, Google

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Via: Autoblog

Source: Teehan+Lax Hyperlapse (1), (2)