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Caroline Hsu, head of communications at Google Taiwan and Hong Kong, says her office has been working on Street View for Hong Kong. In an inteview with the Hong Kong Standard, she confirmed that Google's local offices had been working on a Street View offering, but she declined to speculate on when or even if, the controvercial imagery will be delivered.

StreetView is a set of imagery taken at street level. It covers most of the roads in Australia, some in US cities and a few isolated places in Europe, but has so far not been offered anywhere on the Asian mainland.

Hsu’s comments were made after Google Maps Hong Kong launched a site where users can access information about buildings, cinema screening times, business locations, Wi-Fi hot spots, restaurants and even maps and images posted by others.

Chien Lee Fung, the engineering director of the research & development centre of Google Taiwan and Hong Kong says that the new site provides the names of buildings in Chinese and English.

But he said English-language users may have some difficulty in navigating the site. This is because the ‘Search by building name’ function caters to the usual preference among Hong Kong people of specifying location according to Chinese language conventions.

Google Maps Hong Kong has six local partners providing information, ranging from movies and traffic flows to Wi-Fi hotspots and dining outlets. Users can type in keywords or an address to find instructions on how to get to a destination. A close-up photo provides street-level details.

Enthusiasts can also upload images and videos of their favorite places in Hong Kong.

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