Google Maps has launched a new mode that gives users a real-life look at a place they want to go, called Immersive View. Think of it as Street View in the sky – you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighbourhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to visit. It translates into a faux augmented reality view, overlaying live Google Maps traffic and congestion information.
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Therefore, all the images are computer generated (in real time), a stitching together of the satellite images and Street View shots. As you move through them, it looks like playing a video game on medium graphics set in a precisely scaled real world.
“We’re able to fuse those together,” says Liz Reid, a VP of engineering at Google, “so that we can actually understand, okay, these are the heights of the buildings. How do we combine that with Street View? How do we combine it with aerial view to make something that feels much more like you were there?”
Immersive View will work on most devices, according to Reid. The feature is currently only available in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo, but many more cities are coming soon. “It’s a thing where we had demos years ago, and it was like, ‘oh, here’s the thing,’ but it didn’t really work. Now the technology has come a long way into making it feel pretty natural,” Reid said.
Google Maps is really no longer just an app for getting from place to place. It’s increasingly turning into a digitalized version of the real world, which could have huge implications as AR gets bigger and as Google shifts its focus from crawling the web to crawling the Earth. And, with Immersive View in particular, it’s starting to be obvious how much Google can do with all the data it has.
