The halo represents an aura or glow of sanctity. The most iconic halo – plain, round and in outline only has over the of the history of art been drawn encircling the heads of the Virgin Mary, Old Testament prophets, the Four Evangelists as well as numerous saints and angels to distinguish them as the main identifiable figures within a painting. In the earliest Christian art, the halo was the reserve of the Christ figure, but during the Byzantine era, they were also afforded to emperors and empresses. The stipulation however was that the halo be in outline only. The solid halo, often in gold and with a cross extending beyond it, by way of hierarchy, was to be reserved only for persons of the Holy Trinity, especially Jesus.

The Catholic interpretation is that the halo represents the light of divine grace suffusing the soul, which is perfectly united and in harmony with the physical body. However it was also widely believed in popular piety that rather than a device of metaphorical representation, saints had visible haloes around their heads. This stemmed from the belief that haloes, like the aura of some Eastern religions, are visible to those with perception.

During the renaissance, as the development of highly realistic linear perspective opened up the 3rd dimension and allowed for greater compositional flexibility in art, painting came to be regarded as a window into space and the depiction of haloes became increasingly problematic for artists. The flatness of previous religious iconography determined that the halo be depicted as an aura surrounding the head; now with perspective, they were re-imagined as rings or flat golden disks floating above the heads of saints.

Looking for a tool to assist the navigation of the pseudo-spaces of Street View, Google developed a lightly shaded cursor geometry known affectionately as the “pancake”. The pancake is rectangular when moving across the façades of buildings and oval when following a road. Both shapes contort to fit the perspective of the scene giving an extra sense of depth as the mouse is moved around. This, like the painting of the renaissance, serves to emphasise the window into space metaphor of the embed that holds the panorama.

Double clicking the pancake takes you directly to the best panorama in that particular direction. Sometimes a little magnifying glass will appear in the bottom right corner, this is to indicate that double clicking will zoom in on the current image rather than transport you to another location. This happens when Google determine that the current view is the best for the selected location.

The pancake floats independently and democratically above the heads of everyone and everything. It is both a navigational tool and a metaphorical representation disappearing after 3 seconds of mouse inactivity. It rewards those that it hovers above with a glow of sanctity for about as long as it takes to read this sentence.