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Google seems to have picked up the pace with the rollout of the Immersive View feature for Google Maps. The new feature, which combines Street View with photorealistic 3D aerial imagery to let you virtually explore places like never before, is showing up for more people around the world. More importantly, more places have been mapped interactively in recent months.
Immersive View is available for more cities in Google Maps
Google originally announced plans to introduce immersive views for cities in Maps during its I/O developer conference in May of last year. In July, the company began the initial rollout with photorealistic 3D aerial views of around 100 popular landmarks around the world. You could check out places like the Empire State Building in New York City, Big Ben in London, Alcatraz in San Francisco, and Skytree in Tokyo in a whole new way.
In September last year, Google expanded the feature to more global landmarks. It added Acropolis in Athens, the Oracle Park stadium in San Francisco, and many others, with 3D aerial view support for almost 250 places in Maps. However, a true Immersive View of a whole city, with everything from restaurants and stores to traffic and parking lots available to explore immersively from your phone’s screen, was still missing. Finally, at its Search AI event in Paris last month, Google announced that the promised feature is rolling out.
The company said users will be able to explore London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo in an immersive way in the coming weeks. True to that, Reddit users recently confirmed Immersive View support for London. But that’s not it. Some users can also see the feature going live for Berlin. This suggests Google is gathering speed with the rollout. It plans to expand to Amsterdam, Dublin, Florence, and Venice more cities in the coming months (via). So watch out for it.
You might not want to explore this feature on mobile data
Immersive View on Google Maps requires an extensive amount of data and information about cities. This is likely why the company is taking so long to expand the feature globally. Meanwhile, as a user, keep in mind that the feature is extremely data-hungry. A Redditor recently pointed out that exploring cities in Immersive View consumes around 2GB of data in just 30 minutes. So if you’re on limited mobile data, you might want to connect your phone to an unmetered Wi-Fi network before diving into this whole new Google maps experience.