Internet giant Google has updated its Street View feature so users can
now travel back through time and see how places have changed since the
mapping service launched in 2007.
From today, users will be able to click on a new clock icon in the
corner of the screen when using Street View, which enables anyone to
explore roads and areas almost anywhere in the world.
Clicking this new icon will then allow users to move a scrollbar,
changing the year and even season of the area or building they are
currently looking at to see how it has changed over time.
In a post on the official Google blog, Google Street View product
manager Vinay Shet said: "If you've ever dreamt of being a time
traveller like Doc Brown, now's your chance.
"Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has
changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps
for desktop. We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View
collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of
the world."
Google Street View is one of the company's most impressive achievements,
having been mapped out by cars and mounted cameras driven across most
of the world, but this is the first time Google has made more than one
version of the resulting images available to the public.
"Now with Street View, you can see a landmark's growth from the ground
up, like the Freedom Tower in New York city or the 2014 World Cup
stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil," said Mr Shet.
"This new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent
history, like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake
and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan.
You can even experience different seasons and see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and winter."
Street View has primarily been used as a way of visualising directions
to help users find and identify locations they are looking for, but the
service has become increasingly popular among "armchair explorers", who
have used Street View to discover far away parts of the world without
ever leaving home.
As a result, Google has been adding tourism and beauty hotspots to the service for some time.
This new "time machine" feature will aim to get more people using the
service. Earlier this month, the technology firm added maps of the UK's
rivers and canals for the first time.
Google recently announced that it was to begin using a new algorithm
that can read the house numbers in images on the service, and then
correlate these with real addresses in order to improve the accuracy of
addresses supplied in Google searches.
Source: http://www.socialnewstrends.ml/2014/05/google-plans-time-machine-feature.html
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Source: http://www.socialnewstrends.ml/2014/05/google-plans-time-machine-feature.html
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Warning!
This page/news article is copyrighted. We do not claim any of this article.
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