Have you been dreaming about visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or St. Mark's Basilica in Italy (left)? Now you can take a tour of these landmarks — and many others around the globe — without having to hop on a plane.
Google on Wednesday added a new feature to Google Maps that lets you see 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. The search giant added tours for popular city landmarks and attractions like New York City's Central Park, the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, London's Buckingham Palace, and the Trevi Fountain in Rome, among many others.
To find a photo tour, search Google Maps for a specific landmark, like Idaho's Shoshone Falls Park, and the results in the left-hand side of the screen will indicate if a photo tour is available. Google also posted a link to Google Maps with all available photo tours flagged. To view a tour, you'll need to turn on Google Map's WebGL feature, which brings 3D graphics to the browser without the need to install additional software.
Yes, believe it or not, there is a step that goes even beyond Street View, and Google calls it 3D Photo Tours. “We start by finding clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks. From the photos, our system derives the 3D shape of each landmark and computes the location and orientation of each photo,” Google explained in a blog post. Basically, instead of looking at a flat image of a landmark, you can get a complete 360-degree view of it.
The new feature, launched today, includes 3D Photo Tours of such destinations at St. Mark’s Basilica in Italy, the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. If you navigate to a location that has a 3D Photo Tour available, there will be an option on the left-hand panel of the Google Maps interface. Don’t expect the rollout of this to be quick and comprehensive, but it is always cool to see a new feature in Maps.
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