Location View

» see locaview.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2007 nobody had photographed the street I lived on. Turkey did not get ground-level imagery from anybody until 2013, so the whole first wave of street view services was something that happened to other people's cities while you read about it on a broadband connection in Ankara. Location View belongs entirely to that period, and it was Japanese-only down to the interface, so even the reading was secondhand.

LocationView Co. was a Tokyo company and the site went live on 14 May 2007. You registered, you picked a city, and you got a street at eye level with three hundred and sixty degrees of horizontal panning and a hundred and eighty vertical. There was zoom, and there was a speed control for how fast you moved along the road. It ran in Internet Explorer and Firefox and fed the same imagery into GIS software for people who wanted it professionally, which is where the actual revenue was: real estate.

The technical claim was smoothness. MapJack and Google Maps both worked by dropping you at a photographed point and then teleporting you to the next photographed point. Location View ran a high enough frame rate to make the transition continuous, so the surroundings were animated rather than static. Moving down a street felt like moving down a street rather than like flipping through a stack of postcards.

~ the dossier ~

~ the taxi drivers ~

To photograph Japanese urban density at that resolution you need somebody who can already drive it, so the company hired retired taxi drivers and put them in camera cars. It is a hiring decision that solves the hardest part of the problem before any software is involved, and it is the single detail about this service that anyone still repeats.

The imagery was refreshed every one to two years, which was more often than the competition managed. A fourth generation of the system arrived on 1 September 2008. Coverage ran from the obvious places out to small towns like Wajima and Tono that had no commercial reason to be photographed at all, and Himeji Castle was included with interior images, which nothing else on the market had.

~ what it became ~

Google Street View reached the streets of Tokyo on 5 August 2008. What followed in Japan was not a market fight but a privacy fight. The cameras were mounted high enough to see over garden walls and people objected in numbers, and in May 2009 Google agreed to lower them and reshoot every Japanese city it had already driven.

Location View closed on 27 April 2009, a few weeks before that announcement, and gave no public reason for it. A two-year-old service that had beaten Google to the idea, employed retired taxi drivers to execute it, and got the motion right in a way Google would not manage for years, simply stopped. locaview.com no longer serves anything, and the coverage list survives on an archived About page that a Portuguese web archive happens to hold.

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