TEXTO: GOOGLE INTRODUCES 'TIME MACHINE' FEATURE IN STREET VIEW

Street-level mapping now lets users go back in time to see how cities, neighbourhoods and attractions have changed since 2007

By Samuel Gibbs
Wednesday 23 April 2014, theguardian.com

Google has turned its Google Maps Street View into a time machine to let users travel back in time and see how places have changed. The new feature will let users track changes in landscape, buildings, roads and entire neighbourhoods from around the world since the Street View mapping program began in 2007.

Users can now click on a new clock icon that will appear in the corner of the screen when using Street View on Google Maps on a desktop or laptop computer, firing up scrollbar-controlled time machine, changing the year and even season of the area or building they are currently looking at to see how it has changed over time.

Google's Street View uses car-mounted cameras to capture street-level photos of the world, stitching the images together into a virtual representation of the real world overlaid on Google's maps. Google's cars have driven across most of the world, but this is the first time the search giant has made more than one version of the resulting images available to the public.

Street View has primarily been used as a way of visualising directions to help users find and identify locations they are looking for, but the service has become increasingly popular among "armchair explorers", who have used Street View to discover far away parts of the world without ever leaving home.

Google recently announced that it was to begin using a new algorithm that can read the house numbers in images on the service, and then correlate these with real addresses in order to improve the accuracy of addresses supplied in Google searches.

Disponível em: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/23/google-introduces-

time-machine-feature-in-street-view Acessado e adaptado em 30/04/2014.

No último parágrafo do texto, a empresa Google anunciou que ia começar a usar um novo algoritmo que consegue ler os números de casas das imagens e correlacioná-los com os endereços reais para