More In Recovery
In an incredible virtual album of Japan’s tsunami-torn northeastern region, Google Inc. overnight Monday released the first images from their summer project that uses the Street View feature to allow readers to walk the scarred coastline virtually.
Google announced the initiative to “digitally archive” the northeastern disaster zones affected by the March 11 tsunami and earthquake in July. Since then, Google teams have been compiling data on the area.
The collected images span a driving distance of 44,000 kilometers, or 27,340 miles, of the affected region, enabling viewers to virtually jump onto street corners to take in the surroundings while twirling around 360 degrees. The panoramic imagery will hopefully help people “better understand the scope of the destruction,” wrote Ken Tokusei, Asia-Pacific project management director, on Google’s official blog on the project Monday.
The images can be viewed on a special website called “Build the Memory.” There viewers can drag the yellow cartoon figure toward the top left corner to any shaded area outlined in blue. Viewers won’t find any photos of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the archive just yet. A Google spokesman in Japan said, “The shooting respected both government rules and internal guidelines to protect the safety of the drivers, so at the current moment we only really shot the areas around Iwaki and Fukushima City.”
The program also has a before and after function. One quiet road in one of the worst-affected areas Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, for example, is shown curving smoothly along the shoreline prior to the disaster in the “before” portion. But a click on the “after” tab displays the road pockmarked with jagged cracks — a tattoo of the earthquake.
Google’s team snapped photos between July and November, and viewers can find the rough time stamp marked in the lower right-hand corner of the image. The before shots are grabbed from those taken in July 2008. Not all of the images have corresponding before and after pictures as yet, but Google said it plans to refresh the Tohoku images down the line.
The Street View project is Google’s latest undertaking in helping connect Internet roamers near and far to the disaster that struck Japan on March 11. In late March, Google launched a video version of its Person Finder application, allowing Japanese evacuees in shelters to communicate with people who might be looking for them.