VirtualCity Delivers First Person Views Of The Urban Landscape

"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 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.

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."