I was bored earlier today, so I was randomly looking through Google Street View, and it is amazing. And the obvious thought reoccurred to me that a great driving/racing game could be built around the real street photographs so that you could effectively drive or race around your own local area using the data from Google Street Maps, and if done properly it could be fantastic.

1) Does anything like this exist at the moment?

2) Obviously the player would need a fast and reliable web connection to use this feature. But otherwise, how practical would it be for the game to download the data from google and store it on the players hard drive? How much space would say a typical one square mile area of a city take on a hard drive - I'd imagine a lot, but roughly how much would be a good estimate?

3) Aside from streaming the photo data (or storing it on the hard drive), what other problems would there be? I take it each photo would potentially have to be edited to remove people and other moving or parallex items (as otherwise it would just look unconvincing), and also to delineate which part of the photos represent the walls (vertical surfaces) and the ground, and then to separately add 3D objects such as post boxes, bollards, lamp posts, etc, as part of the ingame engine. And for a real traffic system then you'd have to animate the traffic lights, stop traffic at the right junctions at the right times, etc. No doubt there are more problems to be overcome, nothing in this universe is easy...

So I suppose it's much, much more difficult than it first seems (at least to my bored and day-dreaming mind). But it would be great, and the way technology is every increasing, it might one day be a reality. It's certainly fun to speculate about being able to race around your home town, with photo-realistic graphics!