The Google car passed by my house today as I was getting home. I couldn't resist following it a bit on my bike. I guess they are updating because my area was already done a few years ago.
I just wondered if any of you guys appear on Street View. I have one friend who was caught arriving at his work place.

I can't see the pictures?

EDIT: There they are! Pretty funny

Tony, you realise you've just given them extra work as they'll have to photoshop out your face on every shot!

Katherine and Miss N. were caught loafing about outside 7-11 by our flat a few years back. I just went to do a picture grab but I see they have updated again. Now I see one of the 5 o'clock screamers in the shot.

Me? No way. Hot house flower here. I stay off the streets-except at night.

Some years ago the car was photographing our street when I was walking the dog early morning. But I did not make it to the Google screen...

And only just a week ago, I saw such car while driving though another area of our town.
(not sure that was also for Google, or for another map maker like TomTom/Falkland)

May be it's for 3Dnized? As I know there's already 3d mapping from Google Earth for some US cities. May be google map is going to do the same thing~

Judging by the the amount of times everything remotely to do with computers is updated I am surprised they aren't driving round 24-7.

Bizarrely I found a picture of the same car from 2008 with a different camera- http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodcorp/2653406304/ . I bet that car has a few miles on the clock.

I am curious to know how they decide on what route to take. When I followed this one it appeared a bit haphazard. It would turn off a main road into smaller ones for a while but without covering them fully it would return onto the main road and do the same thing a little further along. I wonder if they have worked out the most efficient way of covering an area or perhaps he was just trying to shake off the mad cyclist following him? I guess it makes a good puzzle-
What method do you use to cover any road system in the most efficient way?

It seems like the orginal 'undercover' car (with large camera on top) now has turned over to another shiny company in this field and acquired some company stickers on the side and back.



Also typical: this british car is branded 'Opel'. Not 'Vauxhall'.....


- Splinter
...who drives an Opel Astra Wagon....

This is known as the Chinese Postman Problem.

It would be more interesting - and useful - to define "most efficient" as the shortest time (or even the lowest amount of fuel/energy required), taking into account deceleration and acceleration round corners, as well as friction at constant speed, rather than simply the shortest route.

Probably you could solve this using the same mathematical method, while assuming that each corner adds the equivalent to a certain straight-line distance in terms of time and/or fuel consumption.

I wonder how different the solutions might be, because in some cases it might be more efficient overall to carry on straight over a junction than slow down and take a bend...

Of course it gets even more complicated when there are hills involved, since slowing down and taking corners is more efficient when you are going uphill, so the equivalent straight-line distance would change with direction.

The density of other traffic on the road would also add a straight-line distance penalty, again depending on the direction. And also any speed limits and one-way restrictions, which may even depend on the time of day.

I assume that modern satnav systems use a similar approach to take into account some of these factors, but possibly not all of them.

I think you can take it as far as you want Kelvin. What about traffic lights and predicting when they will change? You mentioned traffic density but then you have to incorporate real time data. ie today a traffic jam is unexpectedly blocking a route. You then have to consider what information is available to you at any time. So if a traffic jam is blocking a road are you aware of it in advance of hitting it?

... and of course, by the time you gather the data and work all this out, you may as well have taken the longest route anyway.

Have I ever been Google mapped?

No, but my dog has been google earthed

Maybe you should have removed the lat/lon data from that screengrab, we all now know where you live

eh, so?

It's a house. You can find it yourself on google earth. Doesn't matter too much that I live there......

Actually it IS a Vauxhall. They are brought out under a different name in the UK

I haven't been mapped yet, my house has. Just at a time that I REALLLLLLY had to do my garden.. *hrmph*

I'veb een google earthed in my pool back when I lived in Puerto Rico, but never google street viewed, although I saw ~4 google camcars in two cities.

As I stepped out of my house this morning one of the Google Street View cars drove into my road, stopped and then reversed back out again. When I left for work the guy was sitting in the car further down the road.