Google Street View as time travel

I admit it–I’ve used Google Street View to revisit places I used to live, and it’s fun to see our cars still parked in the driveway or on the street.  The views will be updated eventually, of course, but I enjoy the feeling of being transported into the past when it’s presented by Google as if it’s the present.

Even more fun is when I happen onto a seam in the space-time fabric.  On Harrison Boulevard in Boise, for example, there’s a moment when the seasons suddenly change if you shift your view to the other side of the street:


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And at the corner of University and Capitol in Boise, taking one virtual step to the right jumps you back in time a few years, but it seems like a decade or more:

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Even better would be if Google made it possible to dive down through the different “layers” of its Street View drive-bys when they’re updated, instead of just overwriting the virtual landscape with the new images.  Google Earth already does have this capacity for some places, and third-party services like WhatWasThere and HistoryPin allow users to “pin” historical photos to specific locations on Google Maps.

What spatiotemporal quirks have you found in Street View?

Comments

  1. It’s been a while since I checked but street view for the longest time had a car I sold parked in my driveway. I still marvel they drove down my dirt road street. I am also happy to know that Google mid located my address about 1000 feet down the street; the Street view for my address shows just the hill in the road down there.

    I just did a web site for an Italian artist you did a 3 part series on Streetview, one collects the scenes with colo aberrations; another documents part of a story of a man and a car accident, and the third catches glimpses of the google car driver reflected in the rear view mirrors

    http://emiliovavarella.com/works/google-trilogy/

    It’s like a whole world to explore.

  2. Leslie M-B says:

    Wow–the Google Trilogy is really neat! Thanks for sharing it, Alan!

  3. Leslie M-B says:

    And the series of photos of the Google Street View drivers reminds me of the “cleaning” sequences in Wool.