Google Street View goes to the Arctic

On August 22nd and 23rd, the Google Street View team is traveling above Canada's Arctic circle to the remote Inuit hamlet of Cambridge Bay. It is Google's first visit to the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Working closely with the community of Cambridge Bay and members of the Nunavut government, the goal of this project is to share with a global online audience the beauty of Canada’s Arctic and the culture of the Inuit people who live there.

Citizen Cartography and the quest to build the perfect map
Cambridge Bay community members will first participate in an empowering 'Map Up' (Aug 22nd). Drawing on local cultural expertise, members of the community will use an online tool (Map Maker) to add roads, rivers, lakes and several points of interest (such as an ancient stone church and the community freezer) to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's north. Map Maker also supports Inuktitut, which means users can add one of Nunavut’s official languages to places and points of interest on the Google Map of the North.

Street View
Following the Map-Up the Street View Trike will collect images from this remote town and the surrounding tundra (Aug 23rd). Google will train local government and local community representatives on the imagery collection process and leave some of our equipment with them, allowing them to continue share imagery from this region with Google Maps users around the world.

When
The collection will take place Aug 22 and 23, and then it will take a few months for us to process the imagery and ready it for publication on Google Maps (this includes stitching the images into 360-degree panoramic views and applying our automatic face-blurring technology)

How
We’ll using the Street View Trike (which enables us to maneuver into narrow tight spaces where cars could never go) and Innerspace kits (which enables us to take photos indoors)