Now, with much anticipation, thousands of man-hours and trillions of gigabytes of photography Google has launched Google Street View. It works in much the same way as normal Google Maps, however you can now see exactly what the route would look like as if you were driving on the road, taxis and all!

All major suburban roads have been covered and at any point on these streets you have a 360 degree view around you of what that point looks like. You can then move up and down the street and view businesses submitted to Google local business center. So when you drive past a McDonalds in Rosebank for instance, you would see their LBC listing along with their email address, business hours, telephone numbers and more.

The photographs of these millions of roads in South Africa were taken by a series of vehicles with rotating high resolution cameras mounted to the ceilings and corresponding GPS coordinates so each image could easily be arranged once the whole suburbs picture had been taken. If the sheer amount of work and calculations flabbergasts you, you are not alone! This undertaking is truly amazing, and sooner than later we will be able to buy advertising space on these virtual streets.

Click here to take a look at just how amazing this system is and how clear the images are. All you have to do is drag the little yellow man on the left into the street you want to view. A window at the bottom of the screen should open up with a view of that road and the buildings, cars and people on it. How useful would this be if it were real-time (wishful thinking) , no more traffic jam hold ups. Alas, due to the large number of roads we have, these can only be updated every few years, but who knows what the future holds for navigation technology.