Understanding the craze of Metaverse and companies going crazy over it, Google too decided to make use of it in a phenomenal way and chose one of its products ‘Street View’ for it.
For the unversed, Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth that provides a 360-degree view of many streets across the world. Launched in 2007, 15 years ago, Street View is now ready to take a new shape through the metaverse.
There was no evidence of the transformation of online life into the virtual world when Google co-founder Larry Page had an unconvincing idea about providing imagery of map locations, from the perspective of being there, through Street View.
Now, as the metaverse has become the hot talk, where companies like Facebook are investing billions of dollars to create a digital universe in which avatars can do many things like work, play, roam, and shop, it seems Google doesn’t want to make any further delay.
“Larry Page took a camera and hung it in the window of his car,” Steven Silverman, technical program manager at Google, said, pointing to the garage where the cameras for cars, bicycles, backpacks, and snowmobiles take 360-degree photos around the world.
“When the idea of Street View was born, Larry Page knew that he could do something with it,” Steven explained. Now, it seems to be materialized in the form of a metaverse!
Google recently announced an immersive mode that combines Street View imagery with artificial intelligence to create a rich digital twin of the world, where users can explore places as if they were right there.
Google is going to introduce an immersive view to the users later this year, starting in Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
Maps to the Metaverse
Photos, in more than 100 countries and territories, have been captured at places such as Mount Fuji, Grand Canyon National Park, the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. The panoramic photos gathered throughout the years by Google could be helpful now for the metaverse.
According to Steven, Street View provided the virtual experience to users much earlier and its images represent the world using virtual tools. He also assured Google’s product will be on the metaverse and that they will invest in it.
Many other companies have already entered the metaverse and the biggie Facebook has already changed its name to Meta, hinting that it is going to make something big using metaverse.
Ethan Russell, product manager at Google Maps, said that the idea of Street View, which seemed crazy, has become critical now to mapping their efforts, letting users visualize the most up-to-date information about the world while making the map more immersive.
