Fun with Google

Burro Hall put up this picture of an ad painted on a building in New York City.

42nd & Eighth

Cool, and then I wonder what Google Street View would show me. I expected a good deal of grief from Street View, especially since Google has just changed their whole map display thing, but surprise, surprise, it took me right there. (and all I gave it was the caption: "42nd & Eighth").

Although the image wasn't perfect (the upper corners of the building are cut off), I kept it because from my previous experience with Street View I knew it was unlikely I would be able to recreate this exact vantage point, and that indeed proved to be the case.

    However, I did see this:

You really need to see the embiggened version to fully appreciate just how distorted the buildings are. Now I can understand how some distortion can easily creep into a Street View image. They are, after all, recording a greater than hemi-spherical view from a moving car. We won't talk about how amazing it is that they are able to do it at all. The building in the center of the previous two images and to the left in this one is a normal building, built with straight lines and right angles, so the waviness that appears in the wall closest to us in this image I presume to be distortion introduced in the recording process.

     The buildings on the right (that were not visible in the previous two images) might be another matter. I mean, wobbly looking buildings seem to be all the rage these days (I'm thinking that titanium museum thing in Spain. There's a couple others floating around out there somewhere as well). The shorter, roughly cubical, orange one could be all camera induced distortion, but how do you explain the curved line going up the middle of the tall glass one in the back?