Google launched its Street View feature Thailand today March 23 in a joint ceremony with the Tourism Authority of Thailand at the Bangkok Art & Culture Center near Rajaprasong Intersection.
For those of you living in cave, Street View is probably one of Google’s most amazing products – a 360-degree navigable photo panorama of the streets, captured by a very expensive camera mounted on a car.
Right now, only greater Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai have been captured, but Google plans on eventually expanding to all of Thailand. To check out Street View in Bangkok on your own, go to Google Maps here and drag the little orange man at the top of the zoom meter on the left onto the map. Areas that are highlighted in blue are those that have been recorded by Street View – drop the little man in one of these areas and prepare to be amazed. To make things easy for you, we’ve embedded a fully explorable and functional Street View of Victory Monument right here.
Street View software automatically blurs car license plates and people’s faces, but there have been some interesting situations and privacy concerns that have arisen in countries that already have it. An allegedbicycle robbery in Holland was captured for example, and a Florida woman’s right to hold a water jug nakedon her front porch in privacy was violated.
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People are now combing the streets of the three Thailand locations for salacious situations… but so far nothing too juicy has been found. We scanned nearly all of Sukhumvit and all we found was this lousy old farang hanging on a streetlight!
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In all seriousness though, it’s taken a lot of work from Google to put Street View together for Thailand. The team, which has members from Google offices around the world, even put in some overtime to get the service launched ASAP to promote tourism in the wake of the Great Thailand Floods of 2011.
“We knew it would really help the tourism industry and help the economy grow after the floods,” said Thailand head of communications Amy Kunrojpanya. “Physically doing driving, collating images, uploading, reviewing, and blurring is quite the task. But one of the leaders on the Street View team in Mountain View has an ongoing love affair with Thailand. He said, ‘I love this country we have to help them do this.’ It was sort of a make it happen attitude.”
All of the Street View drivers are Thai and many of them grew up in the areas they recorded, so there was a certain element of hometown pride involved. “They felt like they got to showcase their home to the rest of the world, which is really cool. It’s not every day that you get that opportunity,” said Kunrojpanya.
Google will now also rely on users to help make sure everything is kosher. “If someone sees something that is a problem they can report the issue. On every Street View image in the bottom left corner there’s a button to report a problem. We can either blur or remove it. We rely on users as well to alert us,” said W. David Marx, Google’s Asia-Pacific communications and public affairs manager, who flew in from their Tokyo office for the launch.
Next up is a plan to Street View record selected monuments and attractions in Thailand, as dictated by a public poll of Thais in conjunction with the TAT. It’s all part of the TAT’s new “Miracle Thailand: Travel with a new point of view” marketing initiative. Images for these locations will be recorded by the Google Trike, a specially designed bike that can get to places where cars can’t.
Thailand is the 35th country where Street View is available and the first in Southeast Asia after the much smaller and easier to record Singapore. The Street View drivers will continue recording the rest of the country throughout 2012.
The official Google blog post on the launch of Street View in Thailand is here and a video we put together on Street View in Thailand is below.
