A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single click

IDEA N^o 79

SURROGATE TRAVEL

Released in 1897, The Haverstraw Tunnel was a silent movie featuring a train travelling along the West Shore Railroad in New York. Filmed by a cameraman strapped to the front of the train, it was the first example of a ‘phantom ride’.

In 1904, George Hale collected a number of these films and created an attraction called ‘Hale’s Tours of the World’. Offering trips to ‘the Colonies or any part of the world (without luggage!)’, he added extra realism by introducing shaking floors and sound effects. Surrogate travel had arrived. Although Morton Heilig’s Sensorama machine added 3-D images, stereo sound and even smells in the 1950s, the virtual journey remained very similar for more than 70 years (see Augmented Reality).

This all changed in 1978. A team from MIT strapped several cameras to the roof of a jeep and drove it round the town of Aspen, taking pictures every 3 metres. The collected photos were put on a laser disc, connected to a computer and controlled by touchscreen. For the first time, the Aspen Moviemap put the viewer in charge.

In 2007, Google took the Moviemap model and scaled it up. A fleet of vehicles with roof-mounted cameras set about photographing every public street in the world. Geotagging them as they went, they took photographs every 10 metres in nine different directions. The result – Street View – is the most comprehensive photo-documentation project the world has ever seen.

Google Street View adds another layer of information to Google Maps. Dragging the pegman to a spot on the map results in an eye-level photograph of the street. Clicking in a direction starts a zoom-and-pan stop-motion animation down the street. Like any technology that becomes ubiquitous, Street View is incredible the first time you experience it, then it becomes the norm.

Street View has tremendous implications. From house buying to military training, the potential for surrogate travel is enormous. Not only can we visit places without leaving our homes, but also moments in time are being archived on a massive scale. Following the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011, many people lost everything, including their photographs. Google Street View is the only visual record of their lives before the devastating event.

Street View has changed the way we navigate the world, but has it also changed the way we relate to it? Jon Rafman, author of The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, calls Street View a cultural text. Playing the role religions and ideologies have in the past, it provides a framework for our experience. In the same way that photographs become our memories, will Street View become our reality?■

‘The most comprehensive photo-documentation project the world has ever seen.’

A reindeer captured running down a Norwegian road in 2010, one of many strange and compelling images harvested from Google Street View by Canadian artist, Jon Rafman for his ongoing project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View.