(Google)
Google Maps can already give you satellite and street views across a location, but now the app is taking things further by recreating several major cities as explorable 3D simulations.
The feature is called “Immersive view” and Google introduced it on Wednesday during an event touting the company’s latest advancements to improve online search and mapping.
A demo depicted the city of Amsterdam as a 3D recreation, allowing you to view the area from various angles. “Using advances in AI and computer vision, immersive view fuses billions of Street View and aerial images to create a rich, digital model of the world. And it layers helpful information on top like the weather, traffic, and how busy a place is,” the company says.
In the demo, Google Maps homed in on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Immersive view also faithfully depicted the museum and panned around it, almost as if it were a building in a SimCity simulation game.
“If you’re considering a visit, you can virtually soar over the building, finding the entrances and get a sense of what’s in the area,” Google Geo VP Chris Phillips said during the presentation. He then showed a “time slider,” so you can see what the recreated 3D city looks like during different parts of the day and under different weather conditions.
On top of all this, Immersive View will also let you look inside the shops and restaurants across a city. Doing so will trigger Google Maps to show a photorealistic representation of the interior, including the tables, seats, and overall vibe of the place.
(Credit: Google)“To create these true-to-life scenes, we use neural radiance fields (NeRF), an advanced AI technique, transforms ordinary pictures into 3D representations,” the company said. “With NeRF, we can accurately recreate the full context of a place including its lighting, the texture of materials and what’s in the background.”
The feature is rolling out today in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. More cities, including Amsterdam, Dublin and Venice, will be added in the coming months.
For those heading to these cities in electric cars, Google is adding new features for EV drivers with cars with built-in Google support, including the ability to add charging stops for shorter trips, a "very fast" charging filter to help find stations with 150kWh fast charging, and adding charging station details in search results.