Mapjack and Google’s street view will give you street level tours of a city as if you were there walking through the city and looking around. This is achieved by having cars or vans drive through the city with specialized cameras taking pictures at certain intervals on every street to achieve what they call Immersive Street-Side Imagery.

With only a few cities added so far MapJack, a geo imaging company headquatered in Hong Kong and Thailand, has already published 6 cities on it’s site. Four in the U.S. and two in Thailand… Chiang Mai and more notably Pattaya.

The Main difference between Google’s street view and Mapjack is the Fact that Mapjack doesn’t blur out faces or License plates as Google does to protect privacy. MapJack wants to give users “an immersive feeling of actually being there” - an effect enhanced by the use of images captured by cameras mounted on backpack-carrying cameramen walking through areas cars cannot go. MapJack is also the first to add image sets of cities outside the U.S.

Apparently The Pattaya image set was taken just a few months ago and it shows everything through it’s tour of sin city from the Tourists to the bar girls and everything in between. Although there are many people like me who wouldn’t care if their picture got snapped and uploaded to such an image map you can bet there are a lot of tourists that don’t want to be seen…specifically seen on Walking Street or in Boyz Town with a ladyboy in tow. MapJack captures Pattaya in all it’s glory.

Surprisingly, according to a MapJack spokesman, no one has complained as of yet and if asked they can and will blur out faces or license plates upon request.

MapJack actually uses Google’s map template but has added functionality with different buttons and navigation tools.

Fortunately, for the shy ones among you who visit Pattaya, Google has recently announced that it will be adding automatic face blurring technology to it’s street view software soon. The upgraded street view will be retroactive to all image sets already out there including the one of Pattaya. It looks like Google will have the last word on this one.

If you search on Mapjack you’ll notice only the Thai city of Chiang Mai exists. Apparently they thought better of adding Pattaya directly so it has it’s own special place…as it should. Pattaya Photo Guide.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!