Tour the Wired Office in Google Maps Street View

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If you want to know what Beer Robot, the Wired office kegerator, is thinking, all you have to do is follow @BeerRobot?on Twitter. And if you?d like to see Beer Robot?s surroundings, you can now head over to Google Maps. Earlier this week, Wired became the first newsroom in the world to be documented on Google Maps? Street View, after a photo crew stopped by our San Francisco headquarters to shoot both the print and digital sides of our operation.

As with any Street View map, you can navigate through a virtual tour of our office using the familiar directional arrows. The side of the building with cubicle walls, dry bar, and poster-size reproductions of recent Wired covers is where the magazine happens. The side with the open layout, Beer Robot, and (underused)?ping-pong table?is home to our online team.

We?ve actually been contemplating creating our own 360-degree office panorama to share on the web. So when Google spokesman Nate Tyler called a couple of weeks ago with the interior Street View proposal, he had a pretty easy sell. We gave his team full access to our offices, meeting rooms, work spaces, and hallways. All we asked was that Google blur out our faces and monitors. The results are pretty amazing. You can even navigate through doors to go between the two sides of the building

Google has been mapping interior spaces in Street View for a while now, showing things like governmental buildings, restaurants,?museums, and 30,000 pieces of art. And since last October, independent photographers and businesses have been able to upload their own panoramas to Street Views, a project that has delivered a large number of dentists? offices and surprising interiors like Japan?s?Okubo Iwami?silver mine and?Akiyoshi?limestone cavern.?The shoot at Wired is part of a plan to expand into offices and workplaces, which, while not exactly places just anyone can walk into, are still of interest to Street View?s product manager Evan Rapoport, who described these views as ?aspirational travel.?

?I would make two comparisons here,? Rapoport said. ?One would be Antarctica and another would be the White House. These are places where most people will never get to go. The White House is open for public tours but most people will never get there. And there?s a number of other examples I could give you and I would say the Wired newsroom is like this too.?

While this wasn?t a part of the original vision for Google Maps, Rapoport said it was a logical next step for the search giant.??If you want to start to rely on a technology, you need it to be ubiquitous,? Rapoport said.

Google?s Timothy Wang snapped the Wired newsroom using a Canon Rebel T1i, an 8mm Sigma Fisheye lens and a 360 Precision tripod mount that snaps the camera into place every 90 degrees to line up shots. It?s a fairly mid-range setup, not nearly as wowing as the 15-lens Trekker backpack and Street View cars Google is known for. But the decidedly off-the-shelf kit lets the shooter move through tighter spaces without causing a disturbance. Wang shot more more than 500 photos during his visit to Wired while we all worked.

So welcome to Wired.?And apologies in advance for the mess. I blame my coworkers.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/tech/software/~3/Wtj6oyFVKRM/

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