Having Some Fun With Google Maps

It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to take advantage of Google Maps, either for an art project or for a little free publicity. Street With a View managed to take full advantage of the roving camera vans, and in the process, check the results out over there on the left. From the site's page:

"Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008."

Check out their scene breakdown for a tour of the hijinks. Also check out some other examples of either people messing around for the cameras, or companies taking full advantage of the Google satellites. Who knows if this super large scale advertising will take off? A while back there was a bit of a fuss that Target had started using the rooftops of its stores to paint huge logos for google maps viewers. The stores in question happened to be located near airports, so the logos were probably targeted at people in planes. But a lot of people noticed the logos, so it could prove to be an effective tactic.