Google released a new Maps mode on Wednesday, designed to give users a more realistic view of places they go before they even go. The new immersive view is something like Street View in the sky: you can look at the location above to get an idea of the neighborhood and then go down to street level to see the specific places you might want to come across. Maps superimposes traffic and traffic information live, so you get a quasi-augmented view of any park, street corner or beach you watch.
The images behind Immersive View are computer-generated, a combination of Google satellite imagery and Street View imagery. As you move through them, you seem to be playing a video game with medium graphics, located in a precisely scaled real world. “We can bring them together,” says Liz Reed, vice president of engineering at Google, “so we can really understand, well, these are the heights of buildings.” How do we combine this with Street View? How do we combine it with an aerial view to make something feel much more like you’ve been there?
Reed described the feature as offering the magic of Google Earth’s huge increase, but on a neighborhood level. And she said Google has been working on it for some time. “It’s something we had demonstrations about years ago and it was like ‘oh, here’s what,’ but it didn’t really work.” Now technology has come a long way to make it feel quite natural. “
Immersive View works on most devices, Reed said, but so far only works in a few neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo. More are coming soon.
Immersive View works on most phones, but only covers a few cities. Image: Google
As it insists on making Maps a more vivid, 3D experience, it also opens up some of that experience to the application ecosystem. Third-party developers can now take advantage of Maps’ Live View AR feature, which essentially gives them super-precise real-world location tracking and an AR layer on top. Google works with application developers to help you find a place to park your scooter, or to help you navigate stadiums, or simply to allow you to play AR games with dragons in the real world.
Google Maps is really no longer just an application for navigating from place to place. It is increasingly becoming a digital version of the real world, which can have huge consequences as AR grows and as Google shifts its focus from web crawling to Earth crawling. And with Immersive View in particular, it’s becoming clear how much Google can do with all the data it has.
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