No matter how compelling Street View is, it does suffer some limitations. While you can pan and zoom within the web interface, the experience isn’t quite as seemless as you’d hope. The depth of field is often lacking and the experience tends to be more flat and 2D rather than an all-encompassing 3D environment.
Street View Explorer is a portable application for Windows, Linux, and Mac that expands the capabilities of Street View – to the point that you can somewhat walk in, out, and around the point of interest. As the data is pulled from the same repository that Google Maps uses, it’s not a perfect 3D replication – that sort of information just doesn’t exist. Instead, Street View Explorer contains some tweaks and settings that actually go a long way to representing the actual location – by increasing or decreasing the polygon count you can almost remove all the cars or people, creating a surreal effect as you stroll through an empty Times Square .
Street View Explorer comes with 5 locations already configured: London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, and Las Vegas. Additional locations can be added through the interface directly.
Pick your location and you are quickly plopped down into the middle of the street. At which point you can use the WSAD keys to walk around – not unlike your favorite first person shooter. The mouse then controls your head where you can pan up, down, and around.
Street View is a fun little open source utility to spend a few minutes in touring cities you may otherwise never experience.
