Monday, March 23, 2009

Pittsburgh Likes Street View

Well, the Borings don't like Google Street View, but some really creative folks at CMU like it enough to make art with it. Leave it to Pittsburgh to show the world that if you can't trust Google, then, well, you can't trust Google.
Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.
Here's a clip:



Full details here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This was a Sprout Fund-funded project. The guys from Google Street View were some of the main people behind the idea. In fact, I think Google Street View may be based in Pgh. There is a lot of cutting edge camera technology coming out of CMU.

Anonymous said...

Here's a "Making Of" video produced by the Mattress Factory museum, who also had a hand in the project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIDGyRO6w2o&fmt=18