Google Brings Slope View To Vail Resorts

Back in the beginning of February there was a big development with Google Maps. Google is never short of news stories and when the Winter Olympics in Vancouver took place they brought Street View to the slopes and enabled everyone with access to the internet to see the beautiful landscape and ski slopes the athletes were heading down in detail along the tracks. “We wanted to do our best to try to capture some beautiful imagery, and have it available to everyone around the world to see so they can really experience what it’s like to be up there on the slopes,” said Google Senior Mechanical Engineer Daniel Ratner. It’s actually a fairly interesting experience cruising down the slopes through Google Maps, and you don’t need to go out in the cold.



To provide Street View style coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the engineers at Google fitted a still panoramic camera rig to a snowmobile so folks at home could experience the Olympic venues and Whistler-Blackcomb Mountain from the safety and comfort of their desk chairs. Google could not have picked a more appropriate event to launch the “Slope View” version of Street View. While a lot of people were not sure if this was a special project for the Winter Olympic Games, we have just found out that it was not.

Google has now moved on to capturing and mapping all of Vail Resorts. As Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone are our stomping grounds here at SlopeViews, we are pleased to know they have chosen Vail Resorts as the launching pad for all the ski resorts in the United States. We wish them good luck and are excited to see the projects when they are finally done.

Some may think this is direct competition with SlopeViews, but we view it as a compliment and a way to validate our vision. People are becoming more and more used to the point and click still images of Street View and other mapping portals. What we have been seeing emerge now is the use of full 360° video by companies trying to fill niche markets, especially in Europe. While Google is doing a tremendous job, and with the future looking very bright for them, it does not make sense for them to map the world in full video. These ripe markets will be filled with more specialized and targeted businesses. So to sum this up, while Google is spearheading the new mapping era, expect to see additional “street level imagery”, especially in video from many different companies as the public gets more used to this concept and becomes increasingly demanding of new technologies.


With Google Slope View, you click on the arrows to move from one still image to another in your desired direction


The fading out of one still image into the next. The shots are taken in increments down the slope


The next image. As you can imagine, this is very different from full 360° video, but still offers a great user experience