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The Street View mode in Google Maps as well as the standalone Street View app are great platforms for you to virtually visit places that you would like to visit but don’t have the time for. However, despite its advantages, Street View has yet to be perfected into a completely user-friendly platform and needs quite a few fixes and performance improvements, so it will be able to offer the experience of a seamless and high quality video view of the routes that you want to take. To Google’s credit, it must be said that the company did introduce a number of new features this year like adding thousands of new tourist places such as national parks in Street View, introducing the Swipe-To-Move feature and letting you view historic places from across the world. However, the latest update to Street View which was announced a couple of days ago can be termed as the most significant update to the platform so far.
With the new update, Google has introduced more animation frames, thus letting you view streets transitions in a smooth motion, rather than viewing them like a slide show of multiple pictures of a road pieced together. If you want to view the scene around a particular spot in 360 degrees, the new update lets images load in low resolution, which gets rid of stuttering effects and also offers a smoother animation. The new render also builds a 360-degree model of all locations to give you precise images rather than curved edges of buildings or incorrect angles of objects which the old render offered. While these are major improvements that will change the way people look at Street View, the most promising change is the way the update has customized Street View for mobile phone users. Thanks to WebGL, Street View will display places and objects in better frame rate and rendering, thus offering images as close to reality as possible. Street View now supports pinch-to-zoom and double-tap-to-go features which are already available in the Google Maps app in Android and iOS devices.
Apart from improvements in rendering and introduction of more animation frames, the new update has also introduced motion tracking on mobile devices which will let you look around the streets and parks by moving your phone towards the direction where you want to head. You will also be able to view cleaner street names and labels as well as the next camera location which will be highlighted by a small ‘X’ symbol on your device’ screen.