Street view in google earth(how!?)?

I'm wondering how the hell google earth makes street view pictures, considering that hand-making them one by one is foolish... I don't know: do they use a sort of vehicle,maybe a kind of "camera-car" with a panoramic,rotating,camera on a pole...a friend of mine thought that is possible that people by their own provide taking pictures and sending them to google HQ...Any ideas???Street view in google earth(how!?)?
Your assumption is almost spot-on.



They have a whole fleet of cars, each with a roof-mounted camera "globe" array that captures a nearly complete spherical image.



It also has a high-precision GPS receiver mounted on the roof that stores Earth coordinates with each grouping of images. The coordinates are used to known precisely where the camera was positioned geographically when each image was taken.



When you move your little guy around on Google Maps, it will show you the imageset that has the same coordinates as your guy, giving you a remarkably accurate street view.



Behold, the Google Car: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/eye-on-you/go鈥?/a>

More: http://www.autoblog.com/2007/06/01/take-鈥?/a>



People don't provide images to Google. This is all their doing. They contracted with a company called Immersive Media before taking over operations themselves.



And, yes, they literally drive around everywhere while the system captures images.



The cameras have been upgraded to provide a wider field of view. Most of the newer Street view imagery (taken with these new cameras) are so complete that you can pan the image down and see the actual car. On some, you can even see the yellow triangular GPS receiver. They are in the process of removing the cars from the images, replacing them with a big blur. You can see the blur outline where the car use to be...Street view in google earth(how!?)?
I heard of this. Goggle had actually had camera cars to run around the us. Taking pictures of the streets.