Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Google Built Immersive View for Maps”.
If I wanted to go to the San Francisco Ferry Building, I could just use a 2d Google Maps or I could tap here and go into immersive View and get a 3D view of not just the ferry building, but everything around it, including the water palm trees And even these seagulls flying by, I can also see what the weather and traffic is like. Google creates these realistic digital models by combining street view footage with images taken from a 3D aerial camera and we’re about to go check out those cameras and learn more about how Google created immersive view. So, let’s go check it out. Immersive view is Google maps’s latest Flex instead of seeing just a ground level image of a building or a landmark, like you do in street view. Immersive view features these three-dimensional hyperrealistic previews of your journey, so you’ll go into Google Maps.
Let’S say you want to walk from the ferry building to the Palace of Fine Arts, you put in the Palace of Fine Arts as your destination and then they’ll you’ll see a thumbnail up here, an animated thumbnail and you tap on that. Just like you do for imersive view for places you can you zoom in and and if you want to examine it, any part of the route that you’re interested in instead of seeing a red line to symbolize traffic you’ll see a rendering of cars backed up to Really visualize what you’ll encounter and, even though it looks lifelike these aren’t real-time images, it’s purely simulated, a re-rendering of of the capture. It’S not there’s no live camera happening. The idea is to make it look real, it’s all a digital rendering of of previously captured information.
I saw the cameras that power Google Maps as features at the company’s headquarters. In Mountain View, California immersive view is created by combining is captured for street view, with cameras like this and overlaying them with 3D footage taken by this camera, that’s attached to a plane. The result is these threedimensional Bird’s, eyee views of a city or Landmark. These cameras have a different geometry they’re all facing towards one another, where these cameras all have the goal of being in a nice ring with a common focal Center, so that we can create a nice spherical image where these actually have a different goal. By creating Parallax between the cameras, we can use that parallax to help reconstruct the 3D geometry of of the of the terrain and the buildings. Ai and computer vision help to align all the imagery and identify objects like street signs, sidewalks and Road names. When you piece it all together, you get something like this. You can actually it’ll show you, where the turns are you’ll, be able to zoom in um, and you get good good.
Other views from here you’ll also be able to go into street view tilt see what it looks like at the distance. You can see the traffic. Oh, it’s raining, probably not a good time to go for a bike ride. We have what’s known here as the time slider.
What’S the sunset going to look like you know, at 6:20 p.m. on that that evening, Google’s cameras have clearly come a long way since street view launched in 2007. You, if you can see we have a long history of developing cameras here and they keep getting better and more compact over time and more portable. So this is the very first one developed for street view.
This was mounted on top of a van, and we used this van to drive mostly around or around Mountain View and San Francisco, and our first review launch actually used the imagery from this rig. There are also snowmobiles bikes and what Google calls a trucker, which you wear like a backpack to capture corners of the world. You can’t drive a car through the trucker is definitely lighter than that. 500 lb rake Street you started with, but I personally wouldn’t want to wear it for too long. This is like my backpack to work Google’s latest Street View. Camera is much smaller and easier to transport than its predecessors, so compact by comparison, and it looks like a little robot, which I think is just the cutest thing with little eyes and the arm yeah.
I think that’s also not by uh. That’S not by accident. The 3D aerial camera used for immersive view also captures footage for Google Earth and other Maps features. We have very good cameras and we are able to fuse all this imagery together, but then, in the current immersive view, rendering we apply Advanced 3D Graphics techniques such as volumetric, rendering and Ray tracing, and do this on the cloud. There are two versions of immersive view, one to explore: places like landmarks and Parks, which is already available and another for previewing routs, which is rolling out starting in cities like San Francisco, New York and London. So soon wherever you are, you’ll see an option to preview.
Your journey like this, when you launch Google Maps and with details like those seagull I saw flying around the ferry building it’ll all feel a lot more realistic. It’S about the delight and the utility right, not just the utility, but we want people to go to imersive view and go wow. That’S really interesting! That’S really delightful! This is a kind of a tool I want to keep using in the [ Applause ]. Future immersive view is the next chapter of Google Maps, but street view had to walk sometimes with a truer for immersive view to run so give it a shot and see if you can get a new perspective of your world and be sure to give this video A thumbs up and subscribe, I have some mapping to do I’ll, see you later .