The streets of College Park have been digitized.
Last month, Google expanded its Street View program to cover the university and most of College Park. Street View allows users to explore and search through neighborhoods around the globe with panoramic street-level pictures. Users can get a full view from any street that Google has uploaded, and can also zoom in and progress through as if they were in a vehicle.
Google was co-founded by Sergey Brin, a university alumnus whose father remains a math professor at the university, but that played no role in the decision to cover College Park, said Elaine Filadelfo, a Google spokeswoman. Instead, the Baltimore-Washington region was added because it was one of the most popularly requested regions, according to Google's "Lat Long Blog," in which Google employees blog about Google Maps and its assorted features.
While Street View may seem like a mere diversion, Filadelfo pointed to several useful features. She said users could search for available parking locations, find locations of meetings and determine driving restrictions such as speed limits.
"I used Street View a lot at the end of my senior year when I needed to find an apartment in California while finishing school on the East Coast," Filadelfo said. "I looked at the places I saw on Craigslist to see what the building, neighborhood and parking looked like, if there were bike paths and how busy of a road it was on."
College Park is not the only college town mapped on Street View. Ann Arbor, Mich., Austin, Texas, Gainesville, Fla., and Berkeley, Calif., have also been mapped, Filadelfo said.
"Street View can be useful for high schoolers during their college search - they can virtually visit a campus to get an idea of what it's like without actually having to visit," Filadelfo said.
Students said they thought the addition of College Park to Street View could be useful.
"It's a huge project, and given a little time, this could make a huge impact on the way we look at maps," said freshman physics major Robert Perrotta. "Basically, I have just been 'driving' around New York City, after exploring campus, of course, and seeing the sights via Google Street View."
Some students, however, were wary of how Street View could infringe on security and property rights.
"These new programs are extremely dangerous because it allows criminals to investigate their future crime scene without ever stepping foot on the property," said freshman Romance languages major Mary Giuffre.
The main concern about free satellite and street images is anyone with access to the Internet has access to images of thousands of locations and could potentially use them in unintended ways, students said.
It is unclear how Google plans on expanding, but Filadelfo mentioned they are continuing to add new areas, both in the United States and internationally.
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