Gearfuse

Seeing the Google Street View car in your area is nothing new. But what happens when you team up with said Street View team and act out weird scenes on your street? That’s what residents of Pittsburgh, PA did when the cameras came a’flashin’ down Sampsonia Way:

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. 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…

I’ll be honest, though. I didn’t really see all that much except for the sword fight and some dude in a weird costume. Did you spot the garage rockers? Am I just going blind?

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Our favorite itch to scratch, John Brownlee, brings to our attention a photo found on Flickr. It features a red Toyota Prius being pulled over by a police officer on a motorcycle. This isn’t any regular Prius though, this is the Google Street View car that takes all those lovely pictures for Google Maps!

Considering how huge that camera mount is, it doesn’t surprise me too much. I can’t help but wonder if the cop actually ticketed Google. I mean, isn’t Google above the law? They probably offered him an invite to Google’s latest secret: Google Cops – a new search engine that helps search for donut shops in a three-mile radius.

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As far as humiliating shots on Google Street View go, this is surprisingly not the first taste of public humiliation that the Google Maps service has graced upon us. First, we saw the results of a car crashing into a pole, and now, we all get to point and laugh at this kid who happened to fall off his bike as the photos were being shot for the street view.

Is the kid hurt? Probably not anything physically permanent, but the humiliation of his fall might stay with him for a much longer period of time. We’d like to call this, “Google Street View FAIL!”, an ode to those who have been caught in the act of foolishness. — Andrew Dobrow

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