Experience WPI's Campus From Your Desktop | College is first locally to have Street View on Google
The Barlett Center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute seen using the Google Street View feature.
Where won’t Google go? Very few places, as it turns out.
We’re all familiar with Google Maps at this point. But you may or may not be familiar with the Street View function on the Google Maps tool that lets you see what a street actually looks like. For example, if you’re visiting the Worcester Business Journal offices at 172 Shrewsbury St., you can get directions from Google Maps and use Street View to scope out the parking situation and get a visual on landmarks, like the park right next to our building.
Google captures its Street View images by attaching a camera to the top of a car. That works great for major thoroughfares, but not so great for more congested areas that are pedestrian only, like college campuses.
But thanks to some creativity on the part of a Google engineer, street views are no longer restricted to just streets. And the first local college to gets its historic campus documented on Google is Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Virtual Experience
Today, if you look up WPI on Google Maps you’ll see a traditional map with white outlines of roads and gray blocks representing various buildings. But if you view the campus using Google Street View (just click the orange-person icon on the left side of the map and drag it anywhere on the campus map) you can get a fully interactive tour of the school.
WPI was lucky enough to be part of the Street View program through an instance of serendipity. Nicholas Galotti III, a 2005 WPI grad and a staff web applications developer for the school, happened to know someone at Google who approached him about using WPI as a test site for the search engine’s new system for capturing street view images on college campuses. Galotti jumped at the chance and Google came out to the campus in September 2009. The Street View images went live on Google last month.
Now I should back up for a moment and explain how Google captured the images of the WPI campus. As I mentioned, Google uses cameras placed on cars to document traditional roadways. But they can’t take a car on a college campus like WPI, which is mostly connected by sidewalks. So they used a tricycle outfitted with nine cameras, designed by Daniel Ratner, a senior mechanical engineer at Google.
The trike, as Ratner calls it, is a “normal mountain bike,” only it has three wheels, which gives it added stability. It’s powered by old-fashioned pedaling, but it has some fairly sophisticated computers and cameras strapped to the back.
When you use Street View, it looks like you’re watching video footage. But it’s actually a series of still photos strung together.
So far, Google has documented more than 100 locations using the trike. And while the first one was made and used in America, there are now Google trikes all over the world documenting areas that are inaccessible to cars.
Naturally, other colleges in the area are just a wee-bit jealous of WPI. Soon after the WPI Street View launched, Galotti said he heard from his counterparts at some of the other local universities. After all, WPI now has a virtual tour of its campus online at no cost. Schools can pay big money for that kind of marketing.
But Google isn’t stopping at WPI. In fact, any college or organization that would like to bring the trike in to document their surroundings can sign up to participate in the program online. Just type “Street View Partner Program” into the Google search bar.
My one question for Ratner, the trike inventor, was this: What’s in it for Google? Shipping a tricycle with expensive cameras around the United States isn’t cheap. Neither is taking all those images and producing the Street View images that appear online. Why would Google bother with this in the first place?
Well, it all comes back to the search engine’s mission, according to Ratner.
“Really it boils down to the fact that it’s useful and valuable information to Google’s core users,” Ratner said, explaining that the Street View program was the brainchild of one of the company’s co-founders, Larry Page. Page felt strongly, according to Ratner, that location-based information such as maps are central to organizing the world’s information, which is what Google is all about.
And I certainly can’t complain about that. Street views of college campuses are a godsend for journalists like me. I routinely visit local college campuses and have to get there at least an hour early to allow myself time to wander around like a freshman searching for whatever administrative building I’m supposed to visit. With the Google Street View of WPI, I’m guaranteed to not get lost and save time. Winning!
Got news for our Digital Diva column?
E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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