Turn-by-Turn Directions on Steroids

As you probably know, Google recently sent out a small army of camera-equipped minivans to photograph 360-degree views every few feet or so, on every road in many regions of the U.S. and Canada. You have no doubt seen those photos in Google Maps, where you can get a map view, a satellite view, and (wow!) a street-level view.

When this service was first introduced, I wondered what other uses there might be for all those terabytes of data. Today I stumbled on a new "wow" from Google -- another integration of those photographs.

If you ask Google Maps to give you directions, and the roads are covered by the photographic database, you can bring up a window that shows what it looks like every step of the way. For example, click on this thumbnail to see a screenshot showing an upcoming freeway exit in these directions I asked for today:



The integration is so well done that you can click on the white "go here" arrow in the photograph and take a virtual drive of the entire route.

I wonder what cars are on the drawing board now, that will integrate Google's photographs with the cars' on-board GPS Nav systems? (You heard about it here first!)