Australia has become the third country in the world to be scanned by Google’s fleet of “Googlemobiles” for the Google Street View project.
Literally thousands of kilometres of road have been scanned in order to create thousands street-level panoramas of almost anywhere in the country there’s a road.
As you can see from the blue areas above, the coverage is staggering. If you had the time (and inclination) you could travel from one end of the country to the other.
As staggering as it is, however, Google apparantly don’t deem Hargrave St important enough to cover. Maybe the one-way street put it in the too-hard-basket. You’ll just have to wave at us as you head down Liverpool St.
With so many images in the system, more than are few are going to be “interesting”. For example, Gizmodo were sent the following location on Denigan St in the ACT, where it appears the Googlemobile driver decided to make a pitstop at the Erindale shopping centre.
Expect some kind of Media Watch-style outcry about the invasion of peoples privacy, but this is information anyone can get by driving down the street. Google have taken the time to blur the faces of anyone captured in the images.
What remains to be seen is the first real commercial application of this technology that will raise it above being just a (very) cool toy.
