Google Maps Is Adding a 3D ‘Immersive View’ That’s Like Flying a Drone From Afar
At the Google I/O 2022 keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai debuted a new feature coming to Google Maps that allows users a drone-level aerial view of cities, offering a favorable middle ground between satellite and street views.
Immersive View, as the new mode is visited, uses “billions of photos” to model buildings and trees in 3D comic machine learning. The new view lets users understand a city’s topography, rotate their perspective to look between buildings, and see traffic and atmosphere conditions at different times of day.
Immersive View also allows 3D looks into nearby restaurants, allowing users to scan approximately and rotate their view to get a get a better look at the layout, which may be important for those still cautious approximately eating indoors.
Immersive View is created from neural rendering based on photos alone and is streamed from Google Cloud, so it will run on any smartphone or way. The new view will start rolling out in Google Maps for Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo later this year with more cities added soon, per an official blog post.
