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VirtualCity delivers the real thing
IVOR TOSSELL
Globe and Mail Update
Every time someone comes out with a new online mapping tool, like MapQuest or Google Maps, it goes through the three stages of use acceptance.
The first stage is where everyone goes immediately to find their own house. Then they go looking for the last place they lived, then the place before that. Then they look up the kids' apartments or, failing that, the girlfriend's place. And, satisfied that their vision of reality lines up with the computer's, users move on to stage two: saying "humph," forgetting about the whole thing and moving on to lunch. Stage three comes later; that's the part where we actually discover the tool may be useful.
Well, lucky us, we get to start the process again. A Toronto-based start-up called VirtualCity is taking a stab at the art of street-mapping, and the results are eye-opening.
The idea is simple, if ambitious: to provide street-level side-on view of an entire city, keyed to an overhead map. When a user clicks on a street location, VirtualCity brings up a photo of what she would see if she was actually standing there, looking at the buildings on either side of the road.
It works surprisingly well. You can navigate using the overhead map or by punching a street address into the search bar (though the site sometimes gets confused between "east" and "west" streets, like King Street East and King Street West). And once you're looking at a street in elevation — VirtualCity provides thumbnails of both sides of the road — you can "stroll" down the street in either direction.
The elevations aren't provided as a contiguous panorama, but as individual, overlapping snapshots — about 330,000 of them for Toronto alone. (For now, the service is limited to the big smoke — and its commercial strips at that — but the company expects to have a Montreal site ready within weeks, and is also working on the residential areas of both cities.)
VirtualCity worked its magic in a prosaic way: It strapped a high-definition camcorder to the roof of a car that was equipped with a GPS system whose job it was to keep precise track of where the camera was and when. VirtualCity's creators then grabbed still frames from the footage, and correlated them to the map.
The results are really something, but for an unexpected reason. Unlike the distant satellite images that Google Maps uses, whose vast scope musters a sense of awe, VirtualCity's photos are more like day-in-the-life snapshots. Pedestrians walk the sidewalks. Streetcars and fire trucks obscure edges of the frame. You can see the detritus on front porches, recycling in the alleys, cars parked on the margins and the tail ends of streetcars retreating out of view. It's a celebration of the urban mundane. Part of the site's curious appeal is in its fixed perspective. On most streets, the photos capture little above the buildings' second floors (though there are exceptions, like when an intersection provides the opportunity to look down a road). Forget the soaring skyline: This is strictly a car's-eye view. The city, effectively, gets cropped.
It sounds grim, but it also brings out what's best about places like Toronto and Montreal: the long, lively commercial stretches, where no two storefronts are alike. VirtualCity's perspective short-changes big buildings, but it does great things for the city's showcase avenues, ranging from the overexposed enclaves of Queen West and College Street, to the walk-in diners of up-and-coming areas, like Queen Street East and Dupont Street. (Here's a hint: When looking at thumbnails, click the enlarged right-most picture to see it blown up to impressively detailed proportions.)
The hope, according to the company, is that the service will catch on with Internet users who want to preview a destination before going. It's not hard to imagine the site's uses: You could use it to visualize the restaurant you're supposed to meet a friend at before you leave the front door. Should the service make good on its plans to cover residential areas, it would prove a godsend for house-hunters. And, with such a wealth of content, it's bound to attract an audience of virtual tourists.
A pity, then, that most of the pictures seem to have been taken in the middle of winter. The trees are denuded. The skies are grey. The guy pictured walking by the front door of my house looks miserable.
But the fact that that complaint can even be made is a testament to the power of street-mapping: In trying to render a business service, VirtualCity has made a documentary of our streets that's dispassionate, yet totally intimate. Indeed, the site is misnamed: It promises a virtual city, yet delivers the real thing, unadorned, grimy, on a lousy day, with fire trucks getting in the way of the camera.
That's Toronto as I know it, and you don't see it on Google Maps. As the Internet's zoom lens on our lives ratchets ever closer, our warts are getting co-opted into its grand project of documentation. I'm wishing I had done something about the veranda roof before the photographers came by.
