Thursday, June 12, 2008

Dayton "Street View" added to Google Maps!

I noticed yesterday afternoon, completely by accident, that Google Maps had added it's 'Street View' feature for some of downtown Dayton. I considered making a post about it, but as I haven't been to Google Maps for downtown views lately (I already know my way around, fairly well...) I ass-u-me'd that it had been so for a while and that I simply hadn't noticed.

Lo and behold! This evening I found this thread on Dayton Most Metro.

http://www.dayton.mostmetro.com/forum/index.php?topic=464.0

I was happy to learn that I'm not so out of touch after all.

I spent a good hour clicking around downtown. The 'Street View' images are at least a year old, and some have suggested that some images are even older, and even traverse the space time continuum... read the thread at Dayton Most Metro (DMM). It's interesting and funny.

One DMM participant suggested that all of downtown be modeled using Google Sketch-Up. Downtown's central business district has already been somewhat modeled, though it doesn't seem to fit quite right. I'd love to see the Oregon district modeled. I'm not skilled at the 3-D modeling process, but I've done the bare-bones of our location, The Ware Block Building (502-510 E. 5th St.), to scale. I tried to plug it into Google Earth, as a placeholder until I could detail and texture map the thing, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to sit right where it's supposed to be. I'll play around more later.

Again, I recommend this thread at Dayton Most Metro:
http://www.dayton.mostmetro.com/forum/index.php?topic=464.0