Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) unveiled yet another toy this week to add to its arsenal, Google Street View. For five U.S. communities -- New York, Miami, Denver, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles -- one can pull up street-level pictures of the main thoroughfares. The video was taken with an eleven-lens camera mounted atop an auto, but the images uploaded are only slightly clearer than those of convenience store holdups.

The coolness factor is the way it allows the viewer to pan at least 180 degrees from any point. The fear factor for those who mistrust Google is that its library of surveillance footage might just capture somebody with somebody else's wife, someplace other than the someplace they were supposed to be. However, I'd be hard-pressed to recognize individuals in the images I've seen. I do wonder if this is a factor of the source image, or a decision by big G to offer low-res images both to increase load speeds and diminish the likelihood that a figure in the shot can be identified. This should appease those who fear Goo-oogling.

What this feature does demonstrate is how quickly Google is assembling an image database that can be hugely important (and profitable) in the virtual worlds of gaming, flight and driving simulation, travel and emergency response. What we see here is, I suspect, just a nice side benefit of that initiative.

If you have trouble pulling up the site, be patient. It's being hammered today by vanity browsers, people who live in these cities looking for images of themselves.