Google Street View Car to Meet Its Apple Counterpart

The Google Street View car has long ago become a habitual site in most countries of the world, driving around and keeping the street panoramas up to date. However, it seems that we are about to get used to something else: cars similar to Google Street View car, but lacking their distinctive paintjobs has been noticed in several towns in Massachusetts with big white cameras attached to them.

So far Apple Maps has been lagging far behind the far more popular Google Maps, for many reasons, not the least of which being the absence of Street View. The debacle after the launch of iOS 6, when Apple Maps refused to work completely and suffered from a number of unpleasant glitches, didn’t help either. However, it seems that Apple-made analogue of Google Street View is underway; yet it remains to be seen if it is capable to turn the tables.

Anyway, Google has already managed to get light-years ahead: today the company thinks not only of covering more countries by Street View, but about using the technology in new, unexpected and fascinating ways. Only recently The Inquisitr reported about Street View coming to Amazon rainforest:

“With the help of the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation, Google Street View was able to suspend their cameras from a series of zip-lines that moved the camera through the trees as fast as 62 mile per hour (100 kilometers per hour). Over 50,000 photos were taken within the Amazon rainforest and carefully lined up to make 360-degree, panoramic views”.

Google proves that for some assignments you even can do without the iconic Google Maps Street View car – ABC reports that the company’s next enterprise is to capture panoramic pictures of famous museums such as Australian Queensland’s Museum with more than a million annual visitors, allowing people to visit them without leaving their homes.

“It does the same thing as street view imagery, but indoors, so it will still have the navigational arrows and all that to go through the museum, so it will do a virtual tour.”

Certainly, when it comes to unusual and innovative application of their technology, you can’t find anyone more eager to enter the unfamiliar territory than Google. And although Apple has an army of loyal fans, it will certainly have a hard time establishing itself in area where Google already has an upper hand. But who knows, perhaps soon Apple camera car will become as habitual a sight as a Google Street View car.