The Trike has landed! Nominate your favourite Aussie location for a Google Street View Trike visit

Our Street View Trike made its first outing in Australia today, taking a spin around Sydney's beautiful Taronga Zoo. We're really excited to have the Trike in Australia for the first time, because it will let us collect imagery of some of Australia's most spectacular natural and man-made places that are off the beaten track - or, at least, set back from the public roads along which our Street View cars normally travel.


The Street View Trike is a 110kg modified bicycle that can access many places a car cannot (such as bike trails, national parks and beaches) and includes a mounted Street View camera and specially-decorated unit and GPS system.


To give you an idea of the imagery which the trike can capture, check out some of the imagery uploaded to Google Maps most recently on the Google Lat Long blog here.


Google is asking Australians to nominate, via an online poll, their favourite off-the-beaten-track destinations for the Street View Trike to visit. We've developed four categories for people to submit their suggestions:

* City Life
* Cultural Areas
* Natural Wonders
* Hidden Gems

You can submit your ideas at www.google.com.au/trike from today. Entries close on Monday 8 February, 2010.

We'll select a shortlist of the most original ideas in each category, before inviting Australians to cast their vote for the most popular locations for the Aussie fleet of Street View Trikes to visit.

The winning locations will be announced on Thursday 25 February. Keep an eye on google.com.au/trike for further updates and don't forget to wave hello to the Google Trike team if they visit your area!

Posted by Andrew Foster, Google product manager