Virtually Tour Nashville With Google Street View

Remember last year when Google unveiled their new Street View feature on their maps? At first, the feature only worked for New York and Los Angeles, but Google promised to slowly start adding more and more cities.

And now they’ve added Nashville, which is pretty sweet.

If you’re totally clueless as to what I’m talking about, let me briefly describe Google Street View. You probably already know that you can choose to view a Google map in one of three ways: traditional, satellite, and hybrid (the first two views combined together). Satellite is, well, satellite photos of the mapped area. So you can see real pictures of the tops of buildings.

Well Street View is a revolutionary new way to see Google Maps. It gives you an image from the angle of the street. You can rotate 360 degrees and look all around you. So you could run a Google map of a location you’ve never been before, and then after you get your directions you could choose Street View and get a feel for the neighborhood you’re headed to… find some landmarks to help you make sure you don’t get lost on the way to your destination.

So here’s a shot of the Ryman:

And now one of the Parthenon:

The way Google accomplishes this impressive collection of images is with a special new camera. They mount the camera on the top of a van or car, and the camera is like a big ball, that actually has 8 or more cameras pointing in all directions. Then, as they drive down the street, they capture images all around them.

It’s pretty dang cool. I spent several more minutes than I should have “touring” Nashville on Google Street View–checking out old houses I’ve lived in, finding landmarks like The Exit In or LP Field. Hey look… there’s the corner outside the Sommet Center where I always buy my Nashville Predators tickets from a scalper!