Google Street View Moves Indoors 116
Hugh Pickens writes "Google is taking its Street View mapping service indoors with plans moving ahead for 360-degree Business Photos, a program that would send Google photographers to various businesses to snap professional photos for their Places Page. 'This experience, using Street View technology, includes 360-degree imagery of the business interior and storefront,' says Google. 'With this immersive imagery, potential customers can easily imagine themselves at the business and decide if they want to visit in person.' Photographs are taken by 'trusted' photographers, though businesses can also upload their own images via Google Places. It's starting with businesses 'that we know are searched for most regularly,' like restaurants, hotels, retail shops, gyms, salons, and repair shops. Taking internal photos and posting them online brings up some security questions, but Google says its photographs will 'capture nothing different to what a customer would see by visiting the business in real life.'"
eCommerce! (Score:5, Interesting)
Won't be too much longer before Google announces their new "virtual storefront" technology, allowing shoppers to visit stores online in a virtual fashion, picking through actual, real-time merchandise and ordering it online with their credit card (via another Google service, of course). The customer gets a richer shopping experience from the comfort of their living room, the business doesn't have to deal with as much foot traffic, and Google gets a small percentage of every transaction.
Look out, eBay, Google's coming for you.
Re:There are reasons stores do not allow photos (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many reasons most stores do not allow customers to take photos. I predict most chains will be issuing memos to their stores reminding them of the policy against allowing photos.
I'm sure many will, but I doubt it's going to be due do any well-founded fears. Businesses—especially large chains—simply tend to be very conservative, and extremely control-freaky. They simply hate and fear anything that isn't under their control.
I had the odd experience recently of taking cell-phone picture of a shelf of books at a bookstore. Not the store in general, no people, no wide view, just a big shelf of books. Not a closeup of a cover or title page, or, well, anything; the titles are probably barely readable. But the result was that the store clerk flipped out, and threw himself in front of me to block the camera, saying no photos, no photos, etc... I asked him why, and he sort of blathered "you might post it to the internet", "it might be a copyright violation", "some titles might be recognizable", etc. Anyway, the point was that he really didn't have a reason, he was just afraid, of vague murky threats, and in this state of fear, simply wasn't very rational.
And that state of vague irrational fear is the rule more than it's the exception in this sort of situation.