We could be... but why? What's the product?

It makes sense they prototyped it. But putting it into production is $$$, way more expensive than current street view.

Current street view works well enough. How is a massively upgraded 3D version, that is bloated and slower to use on older devices, going to make Google more money?

It feels more like a separate product to license to architecture firms, city planners, video game studios, etc.

Knowing Google’s tendency to kill things they try and fail to revamp, I’ll take this stagnation as long as they keep updating it with new imagery. Street View is the greatest project in human historiography; there’s too much to lose to silly Google management.

While I agree something like this sounds really neat, I am curious what the value proposition is? Pointedly, is it any higher than doing the same thing in a video game in a fantasy world?

We need an open version (as OpenStreetMap is to Google Maps).

Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/) has surprisingly good coverage in some places, but the experience is lacking, partly because most of the images (where I've looked) aren't 360 views.

I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.

I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.

You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.

Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.

So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.

You can do that with Google Earth VR. It’s actually really cool in VR. You feel like Godzilla.

Unfortunately it’s only a small subsets of major cities and the implementation feels so half-baked it could have been an AWS service.

But it’s still a cool tech demo nonetheless.

That's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.

The UX of Google Maps is abysmal even if you don't consider the 3D effects.

What you describe seems to have been implemented in Google Earth. It seems like an intentional product choice to do it in Google Earth and not Google Maps. Most people use Google Maps to get directions and reviews of places, and very few people I know even use the street view feature.