It was almost a year ago, in May 2022, when Google revealed the upcoming news in its main services, such as Google Maps , at its Google I/O 2022. Among the features planned in the navigation app , Immersive View was one of the ones that drew the most attention for offering users a new way of discovering places.
With this new technology, which makes use of the AI that is so fashionable, Google intends to revolutionize 3D navigation in its application by combining billions of aerial images and Street View to show “a version of the digital and enriched world”, as This is how the Internet company itself defined it last year.
Unfortunately, it is an option that is not equally available in all places . From February 2023, there is the possibility of seeing cities such as London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo from a bird’s eye view. Now the deployment for Berlin follows, 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 over the building and then head inside for a glimpse of major attractions like the mummy room or other British Empire appropriations. In addition, you can keep an eye on the box, the entrances / exits, the store or the bathrooms, for example, preparing your trip at your fingertips.
But that’s not all, since Immersive View also shows other useful information such as the weather, road traffic or assistance to a place at a specific time. For example, you can know when a restaurant is busiest or if an amusement park is usually full on weekends.
To create these realistic scenes, Google relies on Neural Radiation Fields (NeRF), an advanced AI technique that turns ordinary images obtained via GPS and location into detailed 3D renderings by adding lighting, different textures, changing the background, etc.
How is it used?
At the moment in Spain we have to wait to be able to try it, since only a few lucky residents of London and Berlin were able to access this new tool from the Google app. However, it is to be imagined that it will not take long before we can test it in one of the Spanish cities. When available, when searching for a certain city, the immersive view will appear at the bottom of the search results, as a card that will appear first in the section of the available photos of the city.
Of course, we already warned that users who have been able to test this tool on their mobile phones complain that, when using the immersive view in the Google Maps application, their smartphone gets very hot, perhaps more than desired. After all, the new representation requires a lot of computing power and more work on the part of the processor. In addition, a high data consumption is required because, as they say on Reddit, 30 minutes of browsing in Immersive View consumed 2 GB of data.