I have no idea if this has been mentioned in this 94-page topic, as there is no board function that searches an individual topic.
In the past year, I've noticed more and more "new" street view imagery that's almost unusable. Wikipedia has a couple of items that may be relevant:
- 2017: On September 5, Google announced that they are improving the quality of the street view panoramic photo, revamping its mapping vehicles with all-new high-resolution camera systems and artificial intelligence to capture even better imagery. The new Google cars have been seen in various American cities since March 2017, as well as in Japan since August. The first images taken with the new generation of cameras were available online on September 13.
- October 2017: The makers of the Insta360 Pro announce the certification of the first "Street View auto ready" camera for US$3500; it uses six lenses for a 360º view and comes with Stitcher software. In addition to purchase, the camera rig is also available to qualified entities as part of the Google loaner program, with 50 cameras available to loan, making possible Google Street View imagery coverage of more places that Google might not visit, and to entities for whom a purchase is impractical or impossible.
There's a lot of imagery in which the roof of the car carrying the camera is visible, and which is super over-compressed and washed out. I'm wondering if this is the 2017 "improved" technology. In Google Earth, this imagery doesn't even respond to navigation clicks. In Google Maps, it looks like this:
https://goo.gl/maps/xP5pN4MXppqJBfPK8This isn't always new imagery where formerly there was none. Sometimes, it duplicates older imagery which is beautiful, and once you land on the bad imagery, you can't get back to the good imagery without exiting and re-entering.
Some imagery shot from more portable cameras, perhaps from the Insta360 gear, is completely cockeyed, rotating around a non-vertical axis:
https://goo.gl/maps/GVe9D5STFM4HC6XH9It's almost as if there's a competition to see how bad they can make this.