When you pan the image all the way down, you don't see the Street View capture car. You see a "Predator"-like ghost shape of the car, filled by lower-res imaging of the street beneath it.
Clearly, they're using the photo taken before/after the car passed a given spot, then using precise mathematics to adjust the image of where the car was/will be. And they must be doing it automatically, knowing the distance the car traveled and the interval between photos, the angle ahead/behind, etc.
But that's exactly what Street View
does anyway. They have a huge database of X+Y+direction+FOV+image, and they tile them onto the Street View user's X+Y+direction+pitch+FOV. It's kind-of neat, but no cleverer than any 3D game, and there's certainly no specific erasing of the car. They just don't snap any images including the car, so the only tile you see is a tiny distorted part of whatever image up or down the street included that patch of roadway.
Peter
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