Skip to main content

Google Trike Takes Street View Where No Van Has Gone Before

While members of the European Union continue to whine about Google’s omnipresent Street View vans cataloging people at their best, ambitious students, bike riders and zoogoers were rallying to get their favorite spots included on the service. After months of voting, Google announced on Monday a list of pedestrian destinations that will appear courtesy of the relatively new Google trike.

The Rochester Institute of Technology in New York will become the first-ever college campus cataloged on Street View after tallying 70,000 votes, to be joined by Boulder Creek Path in Colorado, Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the Detroit Zoo.

All in all, Google collected 238,000 votes to whittle the original list of 24 locations down to the final five.

This isn’t the first time Google has gone off-road to capture Street View images. Just last month, the company famously attached its 360-degree cameras to snowmobiles to comb the slopes of Vancouver’s Whistler Blackcomb Mountains prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Street View trike has also been deployed in other locations too narrow to bring the van, including Legoland California.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Nick Mokey
As Digital Trends’ Managing Editor, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team delivering definitive reviews, enlightening…
Google takes on iPad Pro and Surface Pro with its new Pixel Slate
google unveils new pixel slate to take on apples ipad news 1

After months of endless leaks and speculation, Google finally took the wraps off of its premium new Chromebook at a media event in New York City on October 9 alongside its flagship Android phones. New this year is the Pixel Slate, Google's take on a detachable Chrome OS tablet. The Pixel Slate supports a removable keyboard folio, making it a direct competitor to Apple's iPad Pro and Microsoft's Surface Go.

The Pixel Slate launches at an interesting time -- Google announced the tablet a week following Microsoft's New York City press event where we saw the Surface Laptop 2, Surface Pro 6, and Surface Studio 2, and ahead of Apple's rumored Mac and iPad events. Though Apple has not scheduled a date for its media event, rumors suggest that Apple will launch update its devices, which would give the Pixel Slate some major competition in the premium hardware space.
Pixel Slate
The Pixel Slate is designed for productivity and life on the go, Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh said of the device, which represents Google's re-entry into the tablet space after a three-year absence. The Pixel Slate comes in a midnight blue hue and has a folio keyboard accessory that lets it convert between tablet and laptop mode.

Read more
Developers can now take Google App Maker out for a test drive
Google fix cheeseburger emoji

Introducing App Maker

About 18 months ago, Google introduced us to App Maker, a tool that as its name suggests, allows you to build and deploy apps (specifically of the business variety) on the web. Over the last year and a half, Google hasn't made much of a hubbub around the tool and it has remained in private preview mode. But that all changed on June 14 when Google announced that App Maker had been made generally available to all developers who want to take this tool for a test drive.

Read more
Google prepares an always-connected Chromebook to take on Microsoft
best chromebooks pixelbook

More Chromebooks could be coming in the future with a built-in LTE modem for always-on connectivity. The latest code in Chrome OS reveals that Google may be looking at adding eSIM, or electronic SIM, support to the operating system. Google may even leverage its Project Fi service to provide cellular data to Chromebooks in the future, 9to5 Google suggested.

A code commit with the Hermes codename was spotted by XDA Developers. "Hermes is the codename for the project of implementing eSIM support for Chrome OS," the commit read. "Hermes will be responsible for delivering messages between devices with eSIM chips and carrier servers through profile downloads as well as service discovery for new carriers."

Read more