Imagine this. You’re on holiday, you’ve been out walking, and you need to get back to the other side of town to your hotel.

You come across a bus stop, and you decide to wait for a bus. Whilst standing there, you decide to take a photo of your friends waiting with you.

You take the photo and then show the photo to your fiends. Hang on, what’s that on the photo? The bit of the bus stop in the shot has got a URL on it, inviting you to click on it. You click, and are presented with a bus timetable for this stop. Highlighted is the next bus going to your destination, and the length of time you’ve got to wait!

Amazed, you click back to the photo, and notice that in the background you’ve managed to capture part of a window of a local restaurant. Again, this part of the image has a URL, which you click on. Hey presto, you’re on the restaurant’s website, where you can check the menu and also get a money off voucher.

A bizarre view of a convenient future? This is one envisaged by MOBVIS, the Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios project, which is currently mapping out streets in both Austria and Germany.

The service claims to be able to recognise pictures of surroundings and add URLs to anything in that image it can find information about.

It is a so-called ‘pre-emptive’ technology, designed to anticipate your need to search for information.

The MOBVIS project is funded by EC.

Scary picture of the future? Fantasy comic book idea? Or exciting project that could change searching and surfing habits? Please leave a comment below.

We covered the UK launch of Google Street View last month. The database of street level images from 26 UK towns and cities has been one of Google’s more controversial projects. There have been lots of objections that Google Street View is an invasion of privacy, since it takes photos without any individual’s permission, and in most cases without their knowledge. It has also been described as a helpful aid to burglars.

Despite this, its proved a huge boost for traffic to Google Maps.

The photos are taken from a panoramic camera mounted 12 foot high on the top of a moving car.

The residents of one village near Milton Keynes have turned their objections into direct action. Protesters from Broughton surrounded a Google Street View car to prevent it taking photos of their homes.

A local councilor said the camera was ‘intrusive’ and that people should have been consulted.

The protest was significant enough for the police to be called: “A squad car was sent to Broughton at 1020 BST after reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor”, said Thames Valley police.

This isn’t the first time objections have been raised. Before the project even launched, Google had to satisfy all privacy concerns with the Information commissioner’s office.

For my part, there’s no way I’d get in the way of the Google Street View car. Aside from being a really innovative development in real world mapping, it’s been really exciting to travel along known streets and roads pointing out the homes of friends and family.

And of course anyone can remove images of their house from the database once it goes live, if they still feel like their privacy has been invaded

What do you think? Great innovation or invasion of privacy? Leave us a comment below.

Last month saw the controversial launch of Google Street View. But whatever your view of the privacy issue, there’s no doubt it has been a source of increased interest in Google maps. Since the launch on the 19th March, traffic has gone up by a whopping 41%, making Google maps the 20th most visited site in the UK.

The amount of time people spent on the Google maps also went up. ‘Time on site’ is a good measure of whether or not people like what they find on a website, and want to engage with it. Average ‘time on site’ for an informational site like Google maps is usually around 2 to 3 minutes. Following the launch, average ‘time on site’ jumped from an already strong 5 min 28 secs to 7 min 6 secs.

All data is thanks to Hitwise UK.

Here’s a graph showing the increase in traffic:

So for Google, was it really worth all the negative publicity? I think the numbers speak for themselves. But what do you think?

Google Street View, the street mapping service we talked about last month, has now finally launched in the UK.

And as expected, it has already caused controversy amongst some privacy campaigners.

Google Street View is a street level database of 360 degree images from 25,000 miles of UK roads. The images were taken from a camera on the top of a specially adapted car, and show many streets from 25 UK towns and cities.

Since the Google Steet View car simply drives past taking photos of everything visible from the road, privacy groups have suggested that this is an invasion of privacy since Google are not asking anyone’s permission.

To overcome these concerns, Google have made it possible for images to be removed from the database. What remains instead is just a blank space, with the message ‘this image is no longer available’. However, canny users can just move down the street and look back on the scene instead – in order to see what has been deleted.

Google have already removed hundreds of photos following complaints from individuals. It is thought the images that have been deleted so far contain revealing images of people’s homes, and someone being arrested.

Google have said that anyone can have their images removed if they ask. In an attempt to minimise removal from the database, they have already deployed face blurring technology.

Google for its part says that it is merely showing what is visible from a public road, and that any person there might see the same.

Street View is already live in the US and 8 other countries too.

Have you found your street or yourself on Streetview yet? Leave us a comment below.

As we’ve spoken about before, it seems like the issue of privacy is constantly in the news: whether its online privacy, and the issue of keeping your identity a secret; or real world issues such as CCTV in town centres, meaning that we are being constantly photographed. (With over 4m surveillance cameras in the UK, more per head than any other nation, we’re right to be concerned about these things.)

Now it appears that the online and offline privacy issues are about to come together with the arrival in the UK of Google Street View.

Google Street View is an attempt by Google to make maps more interactive. With Street View when you identify a place using a map, you can then zoom down and see what that location really looks like, using a photographic image. You can effectively see 3D views of a place from the ground. It’s a bit like when you switch from map view to aerial view on Google Maps – you can see what the place really looks like using a real image. Except this time it’s a ground level.

How do they do Street View? Well there really is no shortcut with this one. They have placed a 360 degree camera on the top of a car, and are driving round every street in the country, capturing a panoramic image from every single place.

That sounds like a long time spent in the car for someone! But I also think the final result sounds pretty cool too. If you look at a location on Google Maps in the USA, you will see that they have already completed a lot of the process over there.

However, the issue that’s creating trouble with privacy groups is that people are going to be caught on Google’s cameras, as the car drives past. Publishing a photo of someone (which putting it on the Internet equates to) without their permission is fraught with legal complications. In the US this has already enabled some towns to opt out of the Street View entirely – try and find street view for North Oaks, north east of Minneapolis, and there’s nothing there. There’s also a quite amusing case of a Pennsylvanian couple who took Google to court last year, for taking pictures of their house. Mr and Mrs Boring (brilliant, isn’t it!) had their case thrown out. Since then, Google have deployed a service called ‘deleted-on-request’. Last month they even tried out some face blurring techniques on images in New York.

Laura Scott of Google UK said “We know that privacy concerns are a big thing in the UK, but we feel that we’ve been open and honest. The service has been approved by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office”.

As Google maps is fully integrated, with WebEden, this is an issue that faces you too, when you’re using our Website creator system. If people use a map on your site to navigate, and then choose to include Street View, you as a publisher are endorsing Google’s system.

Do you think that privacy issues are important here? Or are privacy campaigners making a mountain out of a molehill? Leave us a comment below.