Wrong side of the road? No problem.
For a recent news story I was writing, I had to use the Street View function of Google Maps. My 6-year-old son, Luke, looked over my shoulder as I was sitting on the couch and saw that this was as close to a video game as he was going to get right now.
“I want to drive,” Luke said.
I put my laptop on his lap and watched as he clicked on the road in front of him. At first, he was a surprisingly safe driver. Then he apparently got bored.
“You’re driving down the wrong side of the road, Luke!”
He giggled wickedly and said, “I don’t care! I can do whatever I want!”
He clicked on the road, and the view scooted forward in a blur before freezing again, as if he had parked the car in the middle of the road. Then forward again.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going home!”
As I watched the images, my amazement grew. It’s easy to take Google Maps for granted, but wow. Someone decided to send cars with cameras mounted on the roofs, to take pictures of every inch of pavement on virtually every road — in the world? With a 360-degree interactive streetview? (You can also take a tour of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia with Underwater Street View.)
As Luke was “driving” on Belle Terre Parkway, I noticed that sometimes the grass in the medians flipped from green to yellow to green, evidence that one photo in the Street View was taken in fall, while the next might have been taken in spring.
Often, the shadow of the camera is visible on the pavement, a reminder of the countless man hours it takes to provide this real-life video game. Sometimes, there appeared to be double mailboxes in front of houses, just because of the way the pictures were stitches together.
Luke stopped moving forward.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The light is red.”
“Luke, it’s a picture. The light is always red.”
He took a left turn and kept driving, sometimes on the right side, sometimes on the left.
But as my amazement grew, apparently his was waning.
“Are we there yet?” he asked.
It was probably the first time in history that this phrase has been used from the Google Maps driver’s seat, rather than from the real life booster seat.
“Almost,” I said.
I was about to say, “If you don’t stop complaining, I’m going to turn this virtual car right around, mister!”
Finally, we were on our own road, for some unknown reason feeling compelled to see this thing through all the way to our driveway.
“Oh, look,” I said, slightly embarrassed, “it’s our garbage can.”
Luke was ecstatic, feeling suddenly famous for being on Google Maps. “It’s actually our house!” he yelled. “With our cars in the driveway!”
I sat back, feeling like I had just finished a long drive, oddly tired for having done nothing but sit on the couch. Luke was the one doing all the driving, after all. Time for both of us to get up and stretch our legs.
