Google Takes Street View to the Slopes for the Olympics

Google is bring Street View to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics using a snowmobile decked out with cameras to capture slope-level imagery of several runs on Whistler Blackcomb Mountains.

In time for the Games in Vancouver and Whistler, we're thrilled to be bringing this view to the world through Street View on Google Maps. How were we able to gather imagery at 7,000 feet (2,000 meters)? The Street View team's constant experimenting yielded a snowmobile decked out with cameras to capture slope-level imagery of several runs on Whistler Blackcomb Mountains. The view from the top of 7th Heaven chairlift on Blackcomb and from the peak of Whistler are among my favourites, as are the top of the Dave Murray downhill, where the men's alpine skiing events will start, and the Peak 2 Peak gondola. (That's Whistler's new feat of engineering which takes skiers and riders from Whistler to Blackcomb.) With the Street View trike, we've also covered Whistler Village and Whistler Creekside at the mountains' bases. There's more about the snowmobile's journey and this imagery on the Google Lat Long Blog.

This imagery and many other tools are being made available on a new website which provides information about the games in 40 languages. Take a look for up-to-date medal counts, news, event results and event schedules with rich visuals: 3D models and Street View imagery of the competition venues, plus new aerial imagery of the Vancouver-Whistler area.