I remember when I first visited Google a friend of mine who worked there very excitedly showed this to me. I was terribly unimpressed because at the time I was interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab and I had already seen their version of this:

http://lucyabramyan.com/Site/Stage.html

One of my co-workers had built this awesome immersive environment using back-projection, so you didn't have any of the frame boundaries like the Google version did. It was particularly well-suited to viewing the panoramas sent back from the Mars rovers.