Google launched a brand new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to present customers a extra real-life take a look at the locations they’re going earlier than they even go. The new Immersive View is type of a Street View within the sky: you may look over a location from above to get a way of the neighborhood after which drop to avenue degree to see the precise spots you would possibly need to hit up. Maps overlays its stay busyness and visitors information, so that you get a quasi-augmented actuality take a look at no matter park or avenue nook or seashore spot you’re .

The pictures behind Immersive View are all computer-generated, a mixture of Google’s satellite tv for pc captures and its Street View pictures. As you progress via them, it appears like taking part in a online game on medium graphics set in a exactly scaled actual world. “We’re able to fuse those together,” says Liz Reid, a VP of engineering at Google, “so that we can actually understand, okay, these are the heights of the buildings. How do we combine that with Street View? How do we combine it with aerial view to make something that feels much more like you were there?”

Reid described the function as providing the magic of Google Earth’s large zoom however on a neighborhood degree. And she mentioned Google’s been engaged on it for some time. “It’s a thing where we had demos years ago and it was like, ‘oh, here’s the thing,’ but it didn’t really work. Now the technology has come a long way into making it feel pretty natural.”

Immersive View works on most gadgets, Reid mentioned, however to date solely works in a number of neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. More are coming quickly.

Image: Google

As it pushes on making Maps a extra stay, 3D expertise, it’s additionally opening a few of that have as much as the app ecosystem. Third-party builders can now faucet into the Live View AR function of Maps, which primarily offers them tremendous exact location monitoring in the actual world and an AR layer on prime. Google’s working with builders on apps that assist you discover a place to park your scooter, or assist you navigate stadiums, or simply allow you to play AR video games with dragons in the actual world.

Google Maps is admittedly not simply an app for getting from place to put. It’s more and more turning right into a digitalized model of the actual world, which might have enormous implications as AR will get larger and as Google shifts its focus from crawling the net to crawling the Earth. And, with Immersive View specifically, it’s beginning to be apparent how a lot Google can do with all the information it has.