Google Maps' new Immersive View feature will let you fly around hyper-realistic 3D maps of cities

Google has just announced a new exploration feature for Google Maps called Immersive View.

As travel resumes in many places around the world, Immersive View was designed to give users the ability to take a super detailed look at an area of interest. Not only that, it can show you real-time weather and traffic conditions.

In the demo that Google showed, it looks like Immersive View could give users a free-roam camera in a hyper-detailed 3D representation of a place. You can view an area from the sky and zoom down to the streets to get a closer look.

The images that you see are generated using a combination of Google’s satellite imagery and Street View footage. 

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Apart from being able to see areas, Immersive View can work inside buildings too and Google showed off this feature by flying around inside a restaurant. According to Google, they didn’t use a drone to capture this footage. Instead, everything is generated using still images and machine learning.

Immersive View will be available on Google Maps later this year but only select cities will be represented at first. These include San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. More cities will be added over time.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.