Being someone who used to work for a company which took pride in making maps of Chicago IN Chicago, I can shed some light on how it works and how they did it.
If you type an address
51 park ave, New York 11106, United States
into google, you will get a orange looking man icon, click and drag him so that the X beneath his feet sits on a Blue highlighted street.
This will open a popup window which allows you to rotate and zoom in and out on images taken at street level of that address.
The way that they do this is by having someone drive a street with a mounting on the roof made up of 8 cameras, each directed into a different subquadrant around the car.
The phot images are not great, they are taken while the car is in motion.
What I do find interesting about what they have done is to add the directionals (N,S,E,W) into the pictures as a means of orientation.
There is a source out there that has these type of images for select streets in downtown chicago, however the contact info on that fleets my memory.
Saturday will be a year to the day that my former employer let me go, good riddance to bad rubbish.
"Sorry folks, park's closed. Moose out front shoulda told ya."
