Next Stop for Google Street View: The Amazon
Google has been taking its Street View cars and trikes to some interesting locations lately. You can already use it to get a close-up look at Stonehenge and meander through the National Museum of Iraq. The next project for Street View, though, looks like the most adventurous place Google has taken this technology so far: the Amazon. As part of this new project, Google will “pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest.” In addition, the Street View team will also take pictures from a boat as it travels down a part of the Rio Negro.
For now, none of these images are online yet. Once the project is complete, though, Google promises that you will be able to explore a 50km stretch of the Rio Negro River and the Tumbira community near the river. To do this, Google has partnered with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon (FAS), so there is obviously a strong educational component to this. Interestingly, the team also plans to teach some of the FAS’ representatives how to use the imagery equipment and plans to leave some of its tool behind so that they can continue the project after the Google team has left.