What I love about working in digital marketing is the fact that digital tools can be become even more powerful, cool and engaging if and when they are integrated with the "offline" world. You can apply them to marketing action as well as to art, as this brilliant project made in Pennsylvania demonstrates.

What happened is that a group of people decided to bring to life on Google Street View Sampsonia Way, located in the North of Pittsburgh. As Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, the minds behind the project, explain on the a Street with a view website, Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more. Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform.

So does that mean that Google has opened up Street View for everyone to contribute to? That would be smart to get other people to build Street View for you instead of having to do it all yourself. This artistic project must have been a lot of fun.

Posted by: Allan at November 10, 2008 09:45 PM

How long till we start seeing guerrilla stunts that are planned to co-inside with the Google car comming past?

can you imagen checking out street view only to see some guy dressed up as a can of coke or something...

Very cool as an art project though

Posted by: Dan from Idea Bounty at November 13, 2008 09:37 AM

While warm and fuzzy, some people actually use Street View to see what a street really looks like. I'd be annoyed if I went to Sampsonia Way in Street View to see exactly where a business is located only to find a parade blocking that or to find out what it looks like on a random day.

Consider if a city knew the Google Car was coming, what's to stop them from painting over graffiti ("bad neighborhood" graffiti, not artful graffiti) that is there the 364 other days of the year or doing anything else that would artificially color how a neighborhood might be perceived. I recently had to move cross country into an apartment sight unseen due to time constraints and I used streetview to investigate neighborhoods. I'd be pissed if I used this even as one part of my decision making only to find that what I saw online wasn't an accurate representation of the area.

"Art projects" have no business polluting the actual goal of the StreetView project, and I'm a little disappointed that Google got suckered into it simply because a CMU student knew people who could pull a few strings. If someone wanted to do an "art project" with search results instead of StreetView they'd be laughed at. Why's this any different?

Posted by: anonymous at November 13, 2008 09:48 PM