My Google Map Blog

Google has just pushed out 6,000 Street View panoramas at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, including some amazing shots like this view of the Saturn V rocket:

The massive number of panoramas makes this the largest "special" Street View collection that Google has released. Google has many more highlights to show off in their blog entry, and TechCrunch highlights a few more.

Google has also created a special video to highlight this new coverage, which can be seen below:

DailyMotoRide.com has been posting "the world's best motorcycle roads" for over a year now, making great use of various Google tools including Google Maps and Street View. Combined with the elevation profile at the bottom of the screen, it gives you a good idea of what the ride is like.

Now they've added a 3D Fly-Through of the routes by using the Google Earth Plug-in. While the rides don't look as nice as they do in Street View, the ability to fly through the course is quite awesome and adds another great perspective to each ride.

This is a great example of a project that can be greatly enhanced with the Google Earth Plugin, and it's one that is certain to get a lot better once the new 3D Imagery arrives on desktops and in the API. The possibilities for what projects like this might be able to do with the 3D Imagery are quite exciting. We still haven't heard a specific timeframe for it, but Google has said it'll be released before the end of the year.