Help is on the way for people who prefer to know what they're getting themselves into before stepping into a particular restaurant or hair salon.
Edmonton-based photographer Kyle Giesbrecht of InsideView4Business.com will be in Prince George starting Thursday using a version of Google's StreetView to gather the images for online tours of local businesses on Google Maps.
"It's obviously a different kind of camera from the Google cars because you can't drive inside buildings," Giesbrecht said. "It's actually like a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera with a special rotator on it so that we can capture the full 360 degrees.
"And we do a step-by-step through the business capturing a series of panoramic photos which we then stitch together and get put on [Google Maps] just like you'd see on StreetView with the cars."
Giesbrecht has five local businesses lined up for his visit - a restaurant, a footwear shop and a snowboard shop among them - and is welcoming more.
After earning certification from Google, Giesbrecht has been providing the service for about 15 months and over that time it's become a full-time gig. All sorts of businesses have hired Giesbrecht.
"I've shot everything from funeral homes to hair salons, restaurants," said Giesbrecht. "Any business can benefit from it."
Businesses who use the service get an enhanced look that makes them stand out better on Google as well as rights to all the photos that were taken so they can use them on their own websites and other forms of social media.
For potential customers, it provides peace of mind.
"Say you're going to a dentist office," Giesbrecht said. "You want to know before you go to a dentist office that's it's clean in there, that it's inviting.
"It eliminates that nervousness from visiting a business for a first time."
It typically takes 45 to 90 minutes to get the images and they're posted on Google Maps within two weeks. Depending on what the business owner wants, it will be shot with no one inside or with the faces of customers blurred.
Visitors to Google then find the images by typing in the business's name in the search field and then clicking on a small thumbnail with the tag line "see inside" and from there take the tour. For those who come across the business using StreetView, double arrows point to the ones offering the tour.
The most unusual business Giesbrecht has worked on so far is a corn maze near Edmonton. A partial tour of that spot can be found at http://goo.gl/maps/zKu1A.
"It was the first corn maze to be on Google Streetview," Giesbrecht said.
Although trained by Google, Giesbrecht stressed that he is an independent contractor.
