Sketchup PhotoMatchJust last week Google announced street view at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. The new feature, which lets users view 360 degree panoramic photos from the streets of several major US cities, received lots of press despite the fact that Amazon’s A9 maps had a similar feature that launched some time ago (though Google’s UI is definitely a lot cooler).

Google is an interesting company to watch. They frequently surprise people (myself included) by making unexpected acquisitions and launching new products out of the blue. Since my interests span both technology and business, I’m often left wondering what the big picture is — what is Google’s “10 year plan,” so to speak.

I remember one Google acquisition in particular that seemed rather strange to me at the time. In March, 2006 Google bought @Last Software, a small company based out of Boulder, Colorado. Unlike most Google news, the @Last acquisition received little media attention (I don’t think TechCrunch even picked it up). I heard about it from my brother who is an architect and uses SkechUp, a 3D modeling application made by @Last. I soon found details of a SketchUp plugin that lets you place models in Google Earth, at which point the acquisition made some sense. Google was just bringing a popular feature in house…

Or maybe Google had bigger plans. In January, Google released SketcUp 6. One new feature, called PhotoMatch, is particularly interesting. The press release announcing SketchUp 6 says

Photo match provides a way to set up a camera view so that the modeling environment matches up with a photograph. It can be used to match an existing model with a background photo or one can start from scratch with a photo and then create a 3D model.

When I learned about PhotoMatch a few days ago I immediately thought of Street Views. Using PhotoMatch is a manual process right now (see these screencasts), but software development is an iterative process, and PhotoMatch was just released. A more advanced PhotoMatch could be used to combine Street View photos with the 3D models currently available on Google Earth, creating a massive photorealistic 3D model of thousands of buildings around the globe. Eventually every building on earth could be mapped (they already have 3D models of every building in Japan).

Of course this is all just speculation, but it seems like this is the direction they’re heading in. How cool would it be if Google built a complete 3D photorealistic earth?