Google Maps has been working on enhancing the navigation experience through recent changes to thecolor schemefor water bodies and green zones, and achange to the navigation UIwhich hasn’t rolled out yet. However, one of the biggest changes inour favorite navigation appcame in February last year when Google introduced Immersive View for routes. It’s been a year since its launch, but we finally get to see how the company made it work.
Immersive View in Mapsis an odd amalgamation of the standard navigation experience and Street View, garnished with a bit of artificial intelligence. The result is a bird’s-eye view of the route to your chosen destination, and cool as that may seem, there’s a lot of computation at work behind the scenes. In an exclusive interaction with Google engineer Daniel Filip,CNETdiscovered that Google also mounts an assortment of cameras to cars, planes, and backpacks to gather Street View imagery, which is combined with data from aerial cameras to create realistic virtual 3D models of locations.
While you may have seen Google Maps cars traversing the lengths of urban jungles, they specifically help build spherical images for Street View using their array of outward-pointed cameras. In all the years Google has spent building Street View, the company also made its camera rig more portable, dropping the original model’s 500-pound weight to a backpack-style rig. As a result, people are now able to map areas where vehicles cannot go. However, planes play an important role in capturing the 3D image data used for Immersive View model reconstruction.
Unlike the outward-facing cameras of Street View camera rigs which have a common focal center for spherical image creation, the camera array mounted underneath the aircraft features four lenses facing towards each other. The images from the cameras at any instant create a parallax effect, which AI and computer vision then resolve into 3D models of terrain and buildings, complete with accurate identification of street signage, sidewalks, and other road markings. Planes outfitted with such cameras also capture footage for Google Earth and other features you see in Maps.
Immersive View for routes
The 3D Immersive View for routes doesn’t display static imagery, though. Google has thrown in reconstructed animations of the sort of traffic you can expect at intersections and what the location would look like at specific times of the day. For instance, you may see seagulls flying across your screen when viewing the coastline, or replica vans and pedestrians crossing streets, as though it’s happening in real-time. Weather data is also overlaid, so you can plan your journey accordingly, and see what places look like in certain weather.
While the behind-the-scenes story is cool, it also reveals the significant labor involved in expanding the feature’s availability. Perhaps for this reason, Immersive View for routes is available only in major cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, Florence, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Paris, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Tokyo, and Venice. Hopefully, we will see Immersive View for routes expand soon.
