With Immersive View, Google is adding a new viewing mode to Google Maps, delivering a truly spectacular immersive view that lets you explore cities from a whole new perspective. Success guaranteed!
During its developer conference Google I/O 2022, which was held on Wednesday May 11, the American giant demonstrated its progress in several areas at the heart of its activities, such as Android, Google Search and also Google Maps. The cartographic tool used on both computers and smartphones is thus equipped with a spectacular new function called Immersive View (or immersive view in French). Immersive View combines satellite images and images from Street View owned by the firm. These shots, skilfully reworked to preserve the proportions of each building, give a stunning result. Behind his screen, the user thus has the impression of flying over a city entirely modeled in 3D, a bit like cinematic scenes in many video games. An excellent way, for example, to visualize a neighborhood in order to realize the height of the buildings, the width of the streets, etc. And that’s not all, Google added an extra layer of information. You will be able to judge live the current weather, the state of the traffic or the activity which reigns in the district thanks to all the data collected by Google and which we already have in Maps.
To push the immersion even further, Google even offers to enter certain buildings or establishments such as restaurants to see what they look like inside. A bit like sending a drone out to scout. The result looks really impressive. And to top it off, the firm indicates that this new navigation mode will work on virtually any device. No need therefore to own a high-end smartphone of the latest generation or a super-powerful computer to take advantage of it.
Immersive View is being rolled out for the cities of Los Angeles, London, New York and San Francisco. Tokyo is expected to join this small group later this year. Google of course plans to integrate other cities. With Immersive View, Google Maps is transformed a little more into Google Earth, but with increased capabilities since it adds data collected in real time and a much higher level of detail. But the tool for discovering the world still has a bright future ahead of it since Immersive View is currently focusing on modeling large cities.