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Google launched a new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to give users a more real-life look at the places they’re going before they even go. The new Immersive View is sort of a Street View in the sky: you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighborhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to hit up. Maps overlays its live busyness and traffic info, so you get a quasi-augmented reality look at whatever park or street corner or beach spot you’re looking at.

 

 

The images behind Immersive View are all computer-generated, a combination of Google’s satellite captures and its 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. Reid described the feature as offering the magic of Google Earth’s massive zoom but on a neighborhood level. And she said Google’s been working on it for a while. “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.”

 

 

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.

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Quite interesting. Would be cool if they offered an API to access the information 

Beautiful 

Cool!