Fifteen years after its launch, a Google Maps feature that lets people explore faraway places as though standing right there is providing a glimpse of the “metaverse” being heralded as the future of the Internet.
There was not yet talk of online life moving to virtual worlds when a “far-fetched” musing by Google cofounder Larry Page prompted Street View, which lets users of the company’s free navigation service see imagery of map locations from the perspective of being there.
Now the metaverse is a tech-world buzz, with companies including Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc investing in creating online realms where people represented by video-game-like characters work, play, shop and more.
Photo: AFP
“Larry Page took a video camera and stuck it out the window of his car,” Google senior technical program manager Steven Silverman said, while showing the garage where the company builds cameras for cars, bikes, backpacks and even snowmobiles dispatched to capture 360° images worldwide.
“He was talking to some of his colleagues at the time, saying: ‘I bet we can do something with this.’ That was the start of Street View,” Silverman said.
Street View lets people click on locations in Google Maps to see what it might look like were they at that spot, and even look around.
Now, the Internet behemoth is introducing an “immersive view” that fuses Street View images with artificial intelligence to create “a rich, digital model of the world,” Google Maps experiences vice president Miriam Daniel wrote online.
“You’ll be able to experience what a neighborhood, landmark, restaurant or popular venue is like — and even feel like you’re right there before you ever set foot inside,” Daniel said.
“With a quick search, you can virtually soar over Westminster to see the neighborhood and stunning architecture of places, like Big Ben, up close,” she said.
Google is to start rolling out immersive view later this year, starting in Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Street View imagery has been gathered in more than 100 countries and territories, ranging from places such as Mount Fuji and Grand Canyon National Park to the Great Barrier Reef.
“If you want to see what it’s like to go down a ski slope, you can see where that snowmobile has gone,” Silverman said, nodding toward a maroon snowmobile in the garage in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California.
“That trike was really funny because it went around Stonehenge; and we put it on a barge and went down the Amazon River,” he said of another vehicle.
He pointed to a backpack camera system taken for a zip-line ride in the Amazon, to provide a bird’s-eye perspective.
Years spent capturing the real world in 360° imagery bodes well for Google when it comes to a future in which Internet life shifts to immersive digital worlds, said Creative Strategies tech analyst Carolina Milanesi.
“It absolutely plays into the metaverse,” Milanesi said. “The idea of a digital twin of the world is certainly one aspect of it that Google will solve.”
Silverman reasoned that, in a sense, Street View has been giving users a virtual experience for more than a decade, and the imagery naturally lends itself to depicting the real world in virtual settings.
“Ideally, that metaverse, that world that we move into, we’re going to be there,” Silverman said.
Scores of tech firms have been rushing to invest in building the metaverse, a loose term covering the growing ecosystem of interactive online worlds, games and 3D meeting places that are already attracting millions of users.
Facebook renamed its parent company to Meta last year to emphasize its virtual reality vision, and opened Horizon World virtual reality platform to the North American public.
Earlier this year, Japanese giant Sony Corp and Lego’s Danish parent firm announced a US$2 billion investment in US gaming powerhouse Epic Games for its work toward joining the metaverse vision for the Internet’s future.
What started as a “far-fetched idea” by Page is “critical to our mapping efforts — letting you see the most up-to-date information about the world, while laying the foundation for a more immersive, intuitive map,” Google Maps product director Ethan Russell wrote in a blog post.
Huawei Technologies Co (華為) largely omitted mention of its controversial Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products yesterday. The Shenzhen-based company would increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu (余承東), without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei’s progress toward developing in-house chipmaking capabilities despite US trade curbs. Huawei’s new phones have fired up the company’s sales and were among the top sellers in China in the week before Apple Inc’s
US-based tech giant Google said yesterday that its efforts to build four underseas cables to connect Taiwan with the world had created more than 64,000 jobs and generated about US$26 billion in GDP for Taiwan as of 2021. The US company has transformed Taiwan into a strategic cloud infrastructure hub in the world. The four undersea cables are part of the company’s investments in cloud infrastructure in Taiwan, and on the back of the undersea cables, a data center and a Google Cloud Region, which is a geographic area in which Google provides infrastructure and services for deploying applications, Google said in
SLUMP: The electronics, machinery and traditional industries posted the largest decline in the past year; overall, sectors showed gains over the previous month Taiwan’s industrial production index decreased 10.53 percent year-on-year to 91.38 last month, falling for a 15th consecutive month on an annual basis, as weak global economic growth continued to weigh on end-market demand and investment momentum, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. The industrial production index gauges output in Taiwan’s four main industries: manufacturing, electricity and gas supply, water supply, and mining and quarrying. Last month’s decline was the smallest contraction since March when the index dropped 16.03 percent from a year earlier. On a monthly basis, the index rose 7.28 percent, marking a second straight month of improvement,
Micron Technology Inc on Wednesday predicted a steeper loss than anticipated in the current quarter, indicating that an industry slump is still weighing on the largest US maker of memory chips. The company projected a fiscal first-quarter loss of as much as US$1.14 a share, excluding some items. Analysts had estimated a US$0.96 loss. On the bright side, revenue is expected to start recovering in the period. Micron predicted sales of US$4.2 billion to US$4.6 billion, compared with an estimate of US$4.21 billion. For Micron and competitors Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc, this year has been brutal. Customers in their
RSS