Over the past few years, Google maps has been the constant guide for many to take fuel or energy efficient routes and lately the company has added a range of innovative AI-driven enhancements to make it more inspiring for users to plan things confidently. The new features include an immersive Street View experience, augmented reality (AR) integrated Lens in Maps, comprehensive search functionalities, and more. Let’s have a detailed look inside.
Immersive Street View experience
Earlier this year at I/O, Google had announced Immersive View for routes, a completely new way to preview every step of your journey – no matter you walk, drive or cycle. This week the feature has started rolling out for users in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Dublin, Florence, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tokyo and Venice on both Android and iOS. This feature, powered by AI provides an immersive, multidimensional view of your selected root from start to end. What you have to do is to choose your root and request the mode of direction and tap on “Immersive View”. That’s all. Now you will get every single detail of your root, starting from Weather to Traffic conditions and thousands of street view and aerial images to mark your spot, before you start.
Google Lens in Maps
The feature earlier known as “Search with Live View” makes use of AI and augmented reality to help you quickly adopt to your surroundings, no matter you are exploring local places or a new city. You can use this feature by tapping the Lens Icon in the search bar and lift your phone to find information about nearby ATMs, transit stations, restaurants, coffee shops and stores. Reportedly, this feature is being rolled this week in 50 cities including Austin, Las Vegas, Rome, São Paulo and Taipei.
Detailed Map
With the recent update, Google will be more precise and detail oriented with its navigation map. Along with updated colours on map, users can see more realistic buildings and improved lane details on highways to remain well-prepared for turns. Google aims to roll this update in 12 countries including the United States, Canada, France, and Germany in the coming months.
More EV Information
With this feature, the vehicles equipped with Google integration will be largely benefited as the EV drivers using Android and iOS will get more informative data on Charging Stations. This information will make the users understand which charger is compatible with their specific EV model, the charging station location and the charging speed categorized as fast, medium, or slow. Being 25 percent of the charging stations in the United States are down at any given time, so the users can see the last usage status of a charger in order to avoid unnecessary trips to inactive stations.
New Ways of Search
With this, Search in maps becomes more specific as you will get photo-first results of what you’re looking for. The search results are based on the analysis of billions of photos shared by the Google Maps community — all done with AI and advanced image recognition models.” Google aims to roll out this search feature to Maps in France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. this week, with further expansions into other countries in the future.