Google Maps is about to get a lot more immersive

When you think of Google Maps, the first thing that springs to mind may be, well, maps—flat representations of streets and locations. For all their comprehensiveness and intelligence, they still have a lot in common with a Rand McNally Road Atlas from the previous century.

But as Google charts a future for the mapping app, it’s increasingly focusing on features that go beyond its most obvious responsibility of directing you from one point to another. Today, at a product launch event called Search On, the company announced a raft of new Google Maps capabilities, most of which are about transcending its classic maps in new and useful ways.

“We see the future being in far more immersive visual experiences, to really help you get a feel for what a place is like,” says Chris Phillips, who oversees Google Maps as Google’s VP and general manager for geo. “We’re moving from not just helping you know about a place, but helping you experience it.”

Beyond Street View

It’s not that such immersiveness is a new goal for Google Maps. Street View, its feature for virtually tooling around via stitched-together photos of millions of miles of roads, has been around since 2007, when Maps itself was just a couple of years old.

Back in 2007, however, Google was still in the early days of collecting information on the world, which limited how ambitious Google Maps could get. Fifteen years later, it makes 50 million updates to Maps’ data a day, and has plenty of raw material to power new features.

At its IO developer conference in May, the company previewed a new mode called “immersive view” that lets you view landmarks and their neighborhoods from above. Since then, it’s added 100 aerial views of icons such as Westminster Abbey, the Tokyo Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Colosseum. An update today brings the count up to 250 such locations, including the Hollywood Sign, the Louvre, and the Ponte Vecchio.

At the moment, these aerial views are cool but passive—basically mini -movies that sweep around a famous structure. They’re also a rare area in which Google Maps is still playing catch-up with Apple Maps, which has had similar “flyover” views for a decade. But Google’s current aerial views are just a starting point for immersive view, which it sees as a way to deliver valuable facts that might be tough to convey on a conventional map.

“What’s important is not just making these landmarks stunning and beautiful, but it’s the critical information around these places, so that you can make decisions,” says Phillips.

In the coming months, immersive view will turn the current aerial flybys into interactive experiences. Pull up the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park, for example, and you’ll be able to swipe around its environs to check out your parking options. You’ll even be able to swoop down to street level and enter local restaurants to get a sense of their atmosphere. It’s like a Street View that lets you take flight to cover more ground more quickly, expediting your ability to understand a neighborhood.

Immersive view will meld Street View imagery with aerial and satellite photos to provide “this rich, multidimensional model of the real world,” says Phillips. He also touts the “world class predictive modeling” Google will use to anticipate how factors such as weather will affect an area days or weeks into the future. Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo will be the first cities to get immersive views, which will be available on both Android phones and iPhones. (“It’s really important that we have an amazing, compelling product on iOS,” says Phillips.)

One of Maps’ most immersive existing features, Live View, debuted in 2019. It lets you navigate your way around an area using an augmented-reality view of the actual buildings and other items within sight, a boon to those of us who can struggle to figure out north from south on a map. The initial cities to get immersive view—plus Paris—will also be the first to get a new search feature that calls out local establishments such as shops, restaurants, and ATMs in live view. “It’ll even show things like business hours, how busy a place is down the street, what are the services they offer, all at once at a glance,” says Phillips.

What’s the vibe?

Another new Google Maps feature rolling out soon isn’t immersive at all. Still. it’s also about providing a sense of place that goes beyond the basics of mapping. It’s called “neighborhood vibe,” and the goal is to convey the personality of a particular area by highlighting the destinations that help define it—say, art galleries or quaint eateries—–on the map.

There was a time when any good dead-tree travel guide told you what was special about specific neighborhoods. Apple Maps accomplishes something similar with its human-curated guides. Once again, Google is leveraging its vast repository of data and using it in new ways. “What we’re doing is combining our AI with local knowledge from our contributors, who give us about 20 million contributions a day including reviews, photos, and videos,” says Phillips.

All of these new features will appear on pocket-sized screens in an app that users depend on when they’re on the go and in a hurry. So I asked Phillips if Google has to be careful not to overcomplicate things for those who still come to Maps for its familiar core features. Not befuddling anyone “is a really important part of our job,” he says. “That as we add more information and more experiences, we keep the product easy and intuitive to use.” With more than a billion Google Maps users a month out there, there’s a lot riding on the company’s ability to do just that.

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