Blog  |   Puzzles  |   Books  |   About

Five Points

The last few days, I’ve been obsessing over the island of Manhattan (which I’ll be visiting briefly in May), and Google Street View. I’m currently working on a few Street View related hacking projects in my spare time. Here’s one of them.

I wrote some scripts that did an exhaustive search of the Street View information for Manhattan, and found that there are exactly 10 intersections which Street View treats as 5-way intersections on the island – in reality there are more 5-way intersections, but the ones shown here are the ones Google Street View knows about. The rest of the intersections are 4-way or smaller. I call this image “Five Points” to recall the notorious 19th century intersection depicted in Gangs of New York.

Five Points

These panoramic images were taken by the Google Street View camera. I’ve also constructed some interesting high-speed time lapse movies by using sequences of these photos that follow the car. You’ll find some others, made by other people, here.

One Response to “Five Points”

  1. David Says:

    Nice panoramas.

    I’m glad folks are making Google Street View time-lapses. I had that idea when I first used the street view. Actually, here’s my dream: When you ask Google for directions, it automatically creates a movie of your trip which you can easily pause and “rewind” to check out landmarks at the tricky turns. Furthermore, this dream application would be interactive so that in real time during the “movie” you could change the view from straight on to looking left or right–again so that you could look for important landmarks, but also just so you could enjoy the scenery going by.