Street View turns 1, keeps on growing

Posted by Jiajun Zhu, Software Engineer

To celebrate Street View's one year birthday, I am very happy to announce we are bringing Street View to 37 (you heard me - 37!) new areas and we have expanded coverage in 15 of our existing areas. All in all, this effectively doubles our coverage. The new cities include:

• MA: Springfield
• NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
• NJ: Newark
• VA: Virginia Beach
• NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
• SC: Columbia, Greenville
• GA: Atlanta
• FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
• AL: Huntsville
• MS: Jackson
• TN: Knoxville
• KY: Lexington, Louisville
• OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
• MI: Ann Arbor
• MO: St. Louis
• KS: Topeka
• NE: Lincoln
• OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
• NV: Reno
• CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

Now you can stroll under the iconic Reno Arch:

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Along with showing you some great metropolitan areas, I'm especially excited that we're also bringing you 10 new parks and recreational areas:

• Everglades National Park (Florida)
  
• Florida Keys
• Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
  
• Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
  
• Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
  
• Joshua Tree National Park (California)
  
• Death Valley National Park (California)
• Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
  
• Sequoia National Park (California)
• Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)
  

Now you can see the boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park from a very safe distance:

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And last but not least, Street View coverage has expanded in 15 of our current areas: Boise, Boston, Kansas City, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Richmond, San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa, and Tucson.

We've also been spending the past year working very hard to improve Street View image quality. In this push, we removed some of our oldest images, so say goodbye to odd coloring and funky geometric artifacts. The new images have better color and more consistent lighting.

Let's revisit San Francisco City Hall:

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And the skyscrapers of Chicago:

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Now you can look up in all our images. But what goes up must come down, so with this release you can also look down as well. The roof of our car and the 'black hole' really aren't all that interesting -- now when you pan down the car is magically gone and you can see straight to the ground in most of our images!

And finally, in the spirit of getting better with age, the face blurring technology we began testing in Manhattan has been deployed for all of our imagery. Remember that all these new Street View images are simultaneously available in Google Earth and through Google Maps API.