Everyone is familiar with Google Street View. Who hasn’t looked up their own street address and said to themselves, “I know the day those photos were taken, the trash can is in front of the house.”
But have you seen Google Street View Snowmobile? What started as a special project to map the ski slopes for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler Vancouver has expanded to cover remote areas like Nunavut, the largest, northernmost, newest, and least populous territory of Canada.
A weekend project at Google “using some 2x4s, duct tape, and extra hard drives wrapped in ski jackets to endure the freezing conditions” seems to have morphed into a sophisticated snowmobile project outfitted with 360-degree panoramic cameras that are capable of recording snow covered regions where Street View Car cannot traverse.
Google Street View snowmobile has taken photos of ski slopes in front of the Matterhorn mountain in Zermatt, Switzerland in 2011.
In their clever and captivating “End of the Road” photo blog series, The Atlantic.com featured Google images of “A bust of Vladimir Lenin in Pyramiden, a former Soviet-run coal mining facility, now abandoned in Svalbard.”
They also included a Google Maps Street View camera taken from a snowmobile atop Crystal Mountain North in Washington State’s Cascade Range.
If you happen to be lucky enough to spot the Google Street View Snowmobile, be sure to take a photo.
Photos Google, Inc.
Compiled by Dan Gould
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