You may be wondering how Google took all those millions of photos to get street-level views for its online Google Maps. The 360-degree shots were captured by Immersive Media, an innovative company that's been capturing views like this since 2005. The company invented this 11-lens camera called the Dodeca 2360 that takes photos in all directions, and then the various angles are digitally combined and inserted into Google's vast database.

Since Google has just five cities partially covered in its street-level dataset thus far, maybe in about a thousand years the entire planet might have been traversed by these intrepid camera-toting Beetles. So if you see a vehicle (and we hear that some of the pics are being taken by Google's own vans rather than these fancy VWs) with a thingamajig up top that looks like either a planetarium projector or a training drone from Star Wars, tuck in your shirttail and stand up straight because the whole world may be watching. — Charlie White

Immersive Media, via Boing Boing