Apple may have laid claim to Yosemite and El Capitan when it came to naming versions of its operating system, but Google may just have one-upped it with its latest Street View project.
The technology giant’s mapping team has not only added Street View to Yosemite National Park, it’s also scaled El Capitan — a rock formation within the park — to create the world’s first vertical Street View collection.
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In order to produce the collection, Google partnered with high profile climbers including Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold, and Tommy Caldwell.
Even with all that expertise, there were some serious technical challenges Google had to overcome in order to produce the Street View set.
“Climbing is all about flirting with the impossible and pushing the boundaries of what you think you can be done,” said Caldwell in a blog post penned for Google. “Capturing Street View imagery 3 000 feet up El Capitan proved to be an extension of that, especially when you take a camera meant for the inside of a restaurant and mount it thousands of feet up the world’s most iconic rock wall”.
The results are pretty spectacular though. One set includes images of the climbers ascending and camping overnight on the formation, while the other covers the entire vertical route of “The Nose” on El Capitan.
Check out this video for a behind-the-scenes look at how the Street View team did it.
