It's old data. But the 3D view from the plane cams is a good enough replacement at this point (where it is available), if you want a better view of an area than a satellite gives.
Apart from just being nosey, i find street view helpful when driving to an address you don't know, for picking out landmarks etc. The 3D view just about makes up for the lack of street view in that regard.
The 3D flyover actually is hugely useful, more so than street view in my opinion, when trying to figure out one's way through the layout of streets in a metropolis.
For me, it is THE differentiating feature that keeps me using Google maps, rather than a competing service. I take an annual 7 day motorcycle trip though the southwest US, and street view allows me to see a road from ground level which is far more useful that satellite view to determine the road contours, and whether it would be a nice ride. Admittedly, in all the places I ride, street view hasn't been updated since 2008, so its no longer useful to identify business, but its still quite useful.
The thing is they buy these photos from outside vendors and I imagine they are very expensive to get. There's decent coverage from urban areas, but I don't think it scales up as well as street view driving. Also, it's certainly neat for checking out areas in general fashion, but I'm not sure it's especially useful.
I'm currently using Street View quite a lot to check the surroundings of houses I'm interested in. I think this is something a potential buyer could pay a little for but real estate agents usually do their best to hide the actual location of the house (maybe they fear to be bypassed?)
Other use cases:
I check roads, intersections and landmarks when I'm planning new bicycle rides. Satellite view is also very useful. I do most of the planning on the OSMAnd app and I check some parts on Google.
I check the locations I must go to of they are new to me. This is to know where to go and not lose my way on the last few meters (street numbers sometimes are unhelpful.)
Interesting, I don't think I'd mind not having the street view feature. The only reason I use it is to see how foreign countries look like. What are people using it for?
There's a few open data projects that provide similar features to Streetview and can very occasionally be useful in regions without coverage. But yes, typically outside of Streetview coverage you'll be relying on satellite photography, which makes things far more difficult. But that doesn't exactly make the advice here any worse, it just means that the problem you're trying to solve is fundamentally more challenging, so even good techniques might not be able to get you to the solution.
The one view that both Apple and Google seem to promote is the 3D geometric view of buildings and other large fixed objects like trees. While the technical achievement of generating these views impressive, I don't find them useful, and frequently find that it makes viewing the satellite view more-difficult to perceive. Google still provides the "flat" satellite view, but it's somewhat buried in the menus. Bing Maps used to provide very high-resolution 45 degree shot photographed from airplanes, but this is no longer available.
I personally only use the satellite view, I can see what is a park, a street, a river, and in full details without any doubt. The standard map view is useless now for me, I can't find anything there :/
I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data. I was always under the impression that "paved" (or similar) streets were pretty easy to get right (and can possibly be obtained from a governmental agency?). For smaller footpaths I always assumed that they were using movement data (the same they use for traffic forecasting) to detect where they are.
They also resumed Streetview in parts of Germany this year, and I'm not sure they ever fully stopped running them for private data collection.
What most (all?) of those alternatives are missing is the satellite view and street view. I look at it almost every time I search for a place to get an idea of the surroundings for when I'll be there. However links to the same location on Google Maps can fix that.
Anecdotal data point: I've just had a look at Street View to plan a short trip to a part of town I've never been before. I use it to look at complex crossroads where I need to take a turn so it will look familiar when I get there. I do not use a GPS for that kind of trips (it would be overkill.) So for me Street View is what makes google maps so useful.
Don't forget about google street view. It doesn't provide the nice bird's eye view that this does, but there is street level coverage of a good chunk of the city.
“Satellite” view has way better resolution than 3-5 meters in most places. That resolution would indicate that there might be a car, whereas Google’s “satellite” view has enough detail that you can take a good stab at the make and model of each car you see.
I wondered about that but I wasn't able to see the Street View integration without it - I think you're right though - better without the past ones. Thank you.
Apart from just being nosey, i find street view helpful when driving to an address you don't know, for picking out landmarks etc. The 3D view just about makes up for the lack of street view in that regard.
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