It was almost a year ago, in May 2022, when Google revealed the upcoming announcements in its main services, such as Google Maps, in its Google I/O 2022 . Among the features planned in the app’s navigation, the Immersive View was one of those that focused most on offering users new places to discover.
With this new technology, which uses both AI mode, Google aims to turn 3D navigation into an application by combining billions of aerial images and Street View to show “a digital and enriched version of the world”, as. That’s how the Internet company defined itself last year.
Unfortunately, that option is not available in all locations. From February 2023 it is possible to see cities like London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo from a bird’s eye view. Now the deployment follows the Berlin account, as a Reddit user has discovered.
How does it work?
It is very simple. Let’s say you want to plan a visit to the London History Museum. With Immersive View, you can fly around the building and then head inside to see major attractions like the mummy’s room or other British Empire appropriations. In addition, you can keep an eye on the box, the entrance, the exit, the store or the bathroom, for example, preparing your way to the nail.
But that’s not all, since the Immersive View also shows other useful information such as the weather, traffic or help to get to the location at a certain time. For example, you can find out when a restaurant is busiest or if an amusement park is usually packed on weekends.
To create these realistic scenes, Google relies on Neural Radiation Fields (NeRF), an advanced AI technique that transforms ordinary images via GPS and location into individual 3D improvements by adding lighting, different textures, changing the background, etc.
How is it used?
At the moment we have to wait in Spain to be able to try it, since only a few lucky people living in London and Berlin have the new tool from the Google app. However, we must imagine that it will not be long before we prove it in one of the Spanish states. When available, when they search for a specific city, an immersive view will appear at the bottom of the search results, as will the card that will appear first in the photos section of the city’s landmarks.
Of course, we have already warned users who were able to test this tool on their mobile phones to complain that when using the immersive Google Maps application, their smartphone gets very hot, perhaps more than desired. After all, the new representation requires a lot of computing power and labor in the process. In addition, the amount of data consumption required is that, as they say on Reddit, 30 minutes of Immersive View are consumed in capturing 2 GB of data.
