Google Streetview cars have been seen in several German cities for a while now but the Google service is not online yet. The same is true for Austria, where streetview cars are seen in Vienna and Salzburg. But there are several (not so well known) alternatives public available providing the same kind of information. I have posted about NORC an eastern European company which have published streetview imagery for several eastern European countries and also for Vienna.
Recently I come across an other service which provides streetview imagery is sightwalk. Unfortunately only the city Köln is fully included other cities like Berlin, Munich, Bonn, Hamburg and Düsseldorf will follow in the 2nd quater of 2009. Sightwalk uses flash technology to visualize their street panoramas. There is also an possibility to embed the service in your own web application. Instructions can be found on their faq page.
The functionality of sightwalk includes some additional features to Google’s streetview service. Navigation is easy can is done via mouse movements. With green arrows, appearing on the screen, you can move along a road. It also includes pedestrian walks. There is also an interesting functions which allows you to navigate to the next POI (e.g. cinema, bus stop, …) or oyu can highlight interesting places for tourists. The map visualisation is done with support of Open Street Map. All in all this is a nice alternative to Google Streetview especially interesting for tourists, who want to become familiar with their next travel destination.
[site: http://www.sightwalk.de]
