People around the globe will soon see online the streets of Dhaka and Chittagong, and all the establishments — including restaurants, offices and beautiful places — on both sides of the streets.
And this is going to happen due to Google Inc as the search engine giant through its “street view” will explore places in Bangladesh, initially the tourist spots, through 360-degree street-level imagery.
The project begins in Bangladesh tomorrow as two cars equipped with cameras already arrived in Dhaka.
Google will capture the street view in the two cities, assisted by the Prime Minister’s Office and the ICT ministry.
Nazrul Islam Khan, the ICT secretary, said people will be able to find out any places in the cities for tourism purpose, service delivery or law enforcement.
He said Google will bear all the expenses of the project, which will let people explore landmarks, view natural wonders, navigate a trip, go inside restaurants and small businesses, and browse the gallery to see collections from the cities. The government has a plan to include other cities in the project in future, Khan said, adding that the scheme will run for one year initially.
However, the project was supposed to be launched in December but it was delayed due to a conflict between Google and Bangladesh’s telecom regulator regarding YouTube.
The conflict arose as Google did not respond positively to a call of the regulator to block a particular video clip on the video site.
Google Street View was launched in 2007 for several US cities and since then has been expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide.
On June 6, 2012 Google announced that it had captured 20 petabytes of data for street view, composed of photos taken along five million miles of roads, covering 39 countries and about 3,000 cities.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
