The name has been around for months. Google Maps 3D through the media and attracts a lot of interest, because the name promises great things. A few days ago, the product was finally announced under the not-so-catchy name “Google Maps Immersive View”, which has extremely great potential and probably shows the future of the map platform. Because you don’t want to dwell on the beautiful pictures.
Thanks to numerous data sources, Google Maps is visually impressive, as you can see many points on the earth from the satellite view, partly from the perspective of an airplane, through photos of users and, of course, also from the street view. From the combination of all these sources, the Google Maps AI creates the new immersive view, which will soon be available for some of the world’s metropolises. This was originally expected to be a more elegant rendering of Google Earth, as it is here on the blog. have describedbut it is significantly more.
Immersive View offers stunning visuals and, for the first time, truly gives users the feeling of virtually flying over cities. So far there are only images and the embedded video below, but the impression is given very well and, despite similar capabilities, it’s a big leap compared to Google Earth. Admittedly, not all of this is fully calculated by AIs, and Maps editors will sometimes have to lend a hand, but in principle one has probably managed to make such renderings possible with relatively little effort.
It will be many years before Immersive View is available worldwide and it remains to be seen whether AIs can maintain and update this data. But the first step has been taken to bring such a realistic display to the browser. But you shouldn’t stick with the beautiful presentation, because you want to expand it even more.
The announcement already said that it can implement different weather displays, so it could even show live weather on said images. In addition, live traffic and congestion forecasts were mentioned as potential datasets that can be fed into these images. Exactly what it should look like hasn’t been shown yet. In any case, the classic green, yellow and red lines no longer fit in this fancy 3D view. Will the traffic jam be represented with virtually positioned vehicles? That would have something similar to a game.
Immersive View is not a modified Google Maps, but just an additional display variant. However, I think this view could become the standard along with the long-term map display and leave the satellites and street view in the background. Consequently, one wants to present a lot of information. I could very well imagine that place search results can be nicely displayed there, perhaps with buildings that can be flexibly hidden to ensure a clear view. Similar to live traffic, one could also represent live rush.
Something like this becomes interesting for route planning, which can be displayed more realistically than ever. In terms of navigation, that might be overkill and would be more of a distraction than a help, but this area can still benefit from a photorealistic interactive landmarks section. The theme will undoubtedly accompany us in the coming years, we look forward to it.
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