Googland

[G] Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 11:19 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

For many, the start of a new year is also the start of a new semester. Whether you're a current student trying to familiarize yourself with campus, an applicant assessing your options or an alumnus feeling nostalgic, the Street View feature in Google Maps can be your tour guide without the backward walking. We recently added imagery of more university campuses to the existing special collections already available via Street View through our Partner Program. Let's take a quick tour of some of the many beautiful campuses around the world.

In Tokyo's Shinjuku ward, you can find Waseda University. Founded in 1882, it is known for producing some of the top Japanese politicians and business leaders in recent history. Check out the statue of Ōkuma Shigenobu, who founded the university.

View Larger Map

Halfway around the world, we can visit the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Founded in 1451, this university is one of the oldest in the world, and the fourth oldest in the English speaking world. Take a tour of the magnificent campus starting at the West Quadrangle of the Main Building.

View Larger Map

Hop the Atlantic and cross the U.S. to Stanford University, which was founded in 1891 in Palo Alto, Calif. Located near Google's headquarters in Mountain View, both of our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, attended Stanford for their graduate studies. Explore the campus starting at the palm-lined main quad with a view of Hoover Tower.

View Larger Map

Students, take note: Even though your campus is now available in your browser, you still need to go to class! To view other imagery collections of popular universities around the world see a complete list of the campuses or visit a few more highlights in the Street View gallery.

Posted by Chris Fiock, Program Manager for Street View

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/street-view-your-friendly-campus-tour.html

[G] Announcing DartBox2D

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 11:19 AM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Announcing DartBox2D

Today, we'd like to announce the release of DartBox2D, a port of the wildly successful Box2D physics engine to Dart, Google's new language for the web.

Box2D has been ported to other languages, including JavaScript, but this release opens the door to Dart becoming a language for games on the web, which, as we all know, is what the web is really for (that and pictures of cats, of course). The work was started by two interns at Google, Greg Bigelow and Ahmed Hussein, continued by Joel Webber, and finished up by Dominic Hamon.

DartBox2D is a straight port from the Java version and isn't yet using all of the great features the Dart developers have built into Dart, but moving forward it will become a template for how to write great Dart code. The ease with which this port was developed speaks to the great job the Dart team have done with the language.

As developers, we're always wary of premature optimization even when working on a codebase like this one where performance is a key feature. Fortunately, it is already performing well with almost all of the included demos hitting a solid 60 FPS, though optimization efforts are a large part of the ongoing work on the project. You can see for yourself by viewing the demos and more in-depth benchmark results.

All feedback is more than welcome, and you can discuss the project either by joining the dartbox2d-discuss Google Group or the #dartbox2d IRC channel on FreeNode.

By Dominic Hamon, Google, Make the Web Faster team