Google maps Penn's campus

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After visiting last summer to capture footage, Google has launched a Google Maps Street View feature of Penn’s campus — with interactive, three-dimensional imagery of the University’s facilities.

Having highlighted Philadelphia as one of the initial Google Maps Street View cities, Google approached Penn to bring the same technology to campus, according to Business Services Spokeswoman Barbara Lea-Kruger.

The innovation “provides users with a rich, immersive, street-level browsing experience directly in Google Maps,” Lea-Kruger explained in an e-mail.

With Street View, alumni can virtually connect to their campus, while prospective students can explore it before visiting, she added.

Computer and Information Science Professor Kostas Daniilidis, who runs a lab that shares research data with Google Maps Street View, agreed that the application will be “excellent for prospective students who have never been here,” he said.

Though it probably will not alter current students’ day-to-day lives, according to Daniilidis, Street View could help them locate classes or meetings.

Electrical and Systems Engineering Professor Daniel Lee cited several other potential purposes for Street View.

In the future, Penn could utilize services that build on the application, he explained.

“Sometimes, you don’t know even what the benefit of new technology will be before it happens,” he said.

Others, however, doubt the practicality of Street View.

“I don’t see any added benefits, mostly because most students here know the area pretty well,” said Sridar Ravi, an Engineering and Wharton sophomore majoring in Computer Science. “I don’t think it’s going to be tremendously useful.”

But functionality is not the only issue that Street View raises.

In putting footage of campus on the internet, Computer and Information Science Professor Jonathan Smith wrote in an e-mail, the Street View could expose potentially undesirable images such as graffiti.

Privacy and notice of being recorded — particularly to those who do not know they are being recorded — is also a potential problem, added Smith, who co-teaches a “Technology and Policy” course.

“If people are in that footage, it’s a privacy issue,” Ravi said. “If Google is taking pictures of the campus and the students, I don’t know how they would feel about having their image online.”

However, Google has taken precautions to prevent questions of privacy.

In all Street View footage, all faces have been blurred, though bodies and clothing are clearly visible.

As long as this measure is in place — as well as other measures to obscure any identification such as license plates — Street View is ethical, Daniilidis said.

Lee also stressed the importance of privacy procedures.

Street View, he said, “is probably doing what a newspaper would do. But obviously if they cross a boundary, people would complain.”

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