A smiling man pedals, pulling a large camera mounted to a post on a specialized bike used to capture images for Google Street View

Street View opens campus to armchair explorers

Kim Wright

What has three wheels, nine ‘eyes’ and weighs 250 pounds?

A Google Street View tricycle—a high-tech trike rigged with nine directional cameras, a GPS unit and three laser scanners.

The cycle-mounted camera system snaps 360-degree photos anywhere a person can walk, giving viewers a peek at places that cars can’t reach: national parks, monuments, zoos, and, by the end of this year, the lush footpaths of the University of Toronto Mississauga. 

The Street View tricycle rolled across campus in early June, photographing buildings, walkways and trails, as the campus becomes part of Google’s sweeping Street View project. A similarly equipped SUV, nicknamed the ‘Googlemobile’, captured images of parking lots, intersections and surrounding roadways.

Street View technology magnifies a Google map coordinate, showing off the globe’s most fascinating cities and locations from a street-level perspective. Street View launched in five U.S. cities in 2007, expanded to Canada in 2009, and is now available in 48 countries and all seven continents. 

Street View will broaden public awareness of U of T Mississauga, and help current and prospective students as well as visitors navigate their way around campus, said Jane Stirling, director of marketing and communications. ”Users will be just a few clicks away from exploring the beauty and places of interest at UTM. Students can take a virtual campus tour, plan their path to class, or find bike racks and city bus stops.”

Wendy Bairos, manager of communications at Google Canada, said the Internet company approached Canadian universities through the Street View Partner Program in early 2012. “As soon as the weather and daylight hours would permit us to take pictures, we deployed a Street View fleet to campuses in Western Canada, and another fleet to Central and East,” she said.

Once Street View vehicles have collected the photographs, GPS data is used to align the photos onto a Google map and stitch them together into a seamless panoramic view. During the process, human faces and licence plates are automatically blurred.

Privacy concerns are handled through the ‘Report a Problem’ button found in the bottom-left corner of any Street View image. “Anyone can request a further blurring of their image, or even removal of their house or car from a photo,” Bairos said “We take privacy requests very seriously.”

Along with the SUV and tricycle, Google has introduced a Street View trolley and snowmobile to keep up with the blistering surge in digital tourism. The compact trolley takes art lovers inside 17 of the world’s most famous museums to browse over 1,000 works of art, while the snowmobile transports viewers up 7,000 feet to the site of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics’ ski runs.

Recently, Google announced plans to launch Sea View, a 360-degree underwater view of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Images of U of T Mississauga will be incorporated into the Street View system on Google Maps and should be available for online viewing in late 2012.