Google Street View captures the view from the world's tallest building

Google captures view from world's tallest building

The incredible view from the 80th floor of the Burj Khalifa, captured by Google Street View.

Users can wander through the building from the lower levels up to the observation deck on the 124th floor. The tools for navigating through the building will be familiar to anyone who has used Google Street View. But on the left-hand side of the screen there is an extra widget which allows users to select the floor they wish to explore.

Visitors captured by Google's 360 degree Street View camera look out from the world's highest observation deck.

Street View uses face detection technology to blur people's faces, such as those of this couple on the 124th floor. Google admits that in some cases its technology has accidentally blurred the faces of horses and even statues.

The project also captures the Burj Khalifa's surrounding grounds, including the fountains in the building's forecourt.

The team shooting the Burj Khalifa was led by Street View program manager Pascal Malite. The entire project took about three days.

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The Burj Khalifa featured in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. One scene featured Tom Cruise swinging from the windows and climbing the side of the massive structure.

In Arabic Burj means tower, and the building is named after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates.

The Burj Khalifa was officially opened on Jan 4, 2010 with a spectacular fireworks show. It was held 1,325 days after excavation work started, and was attended by over 6,000 guests.

Construction of the tower began in 2004. The completed building has 900 apartments, 304 hotel rooms and 2,857 parking spaces.

The view from above

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(CNN) -- Fancy a stroll around the observation deck of the tallest building in the world?

Normally, doing so would involve a flight to Dubai, an expensive hotel room and a struggle through traffic under blazing sunshine. But now you can take it all in from the comfort of your own living room.

Google has launched a new project capturing a 360-degree view of the iconic Burj Khalifa in Dubai -- a building so enormous it is sometimes referred to as the "vertical city."

The images taken by Google allow users to navigate through the building, using Street View technology, which the company generally uses to map cities. Users can explore the structure from the opulent basement entrance hall to the highest occupied apartment in the world on the building's 163rd floor.

To compile the images, Google's photographers used state of the art equipmentand battled 40 mph winds at the top of the building's spire, 828 meters (2,716 feet) above ground level.

The pictures will be the first time Street View has been used in the Middle East, and the first collection of images to feature a skyscraper.

The Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure in the world. Modeled on principles of classical Islamic architecture. The building took six years and more than 22 million man-hours to erect.

The edifice's massive foundations required over 58,900 cubic yards of concrete, weighing more than 110,000 tonnes. Close to 26,000 glass panels, each individually hand-cut, were used in the exterior cladding -- equivalent to 17 soccer fields of material.

Google's Street View technology had to be specially adapted to document buildings such as this. The 360 degree cameras are mounted on a backpack which can be carried by a single operator. Other landmarks and natural wonders like the Eiffel Tower and Grand Canyon have also been captured by the technology.

Fuente: Link a noticia

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