Where oh where am I?

In response to Eva's post, Where oh where is COTF?, I am sharing with you a new tool, and one to learn more about your world.

Launched in 2007, Street View is a feature of Google Maps that provides a 360° panoramic street-level view of certain cities in the world. Most of the cities available are in the United States, France, Italy, Australia and Japan. (Hopefully Singapore will be covered soon)

What's really cool is that you can use a view port to literaly 'walk' or rather 'drive' along streets that has been captured. Using the mouse, you can pan and tilt the view port to 'look' at the different features along the street. I am quite surprised to see the amount of streets that was covered in each city, it's pretty comprehensive.

I've always been a travel bug (a really really small bug that is, don't have the time and money to visit all the places I've wanted), but how about travelling to many cities in one hour? All in the comfort of your chair? Of course nothing beats being there, but I will settle for second best now.

Such tools are great to arouse the curiosity of children, and to allow them to roam in a virtual environment to learn more about a particular place. Imagine merging 2nd Life and this technology to allow virutal communication

I've always wanted to visit Tokyo's Odaiba district and take a look at the Tokyo Ferris Wheel in Japan. Here is the poor man's version of travelling there:

I did a quick search on 'Tokyo Odaiba' and quickly learnt that 'Daiba' means 'fort', and also noted many interesting sites such as the 'Rainbow Bridge' around this area.


The Statue of Liberty replica with the Rainbow Bridge behind it.


Where is this statue located? Let's get back to looking for the ferris wheel.


I did the same search in Google Maps and noticed that some one has already placed a marker there.


Let's zoom in, oh look, here it is.


Ok, found it, but the view from this street is blocked by the highway. Let me move to another street.


Here it is! Finally! I'm going to take this chance to walk around and look for the other point of interests as well.