Google Maps is celebrating its anniversary, and as a celebration of its first 15 years of operation, it has added to its mobile apps the possibility of navigate from the Street View option through the historical archive of images captured at street level by its cameras.
Google Maps has been providing subjective perspective views at street level for 15 years now thanks to Street View
Cameras that, by the way, has also taken advantage of the anniversary to present the new model, much more compact and lighter (just 6.8 kilos), which will facilitate the future obtaining of new images for Street View. An addition that, over time, has been incorporating improvements such as the one that allows you to do it on the same screen while also showing the map of the area in zenithal perspective.
The ability to “navigate through the past” through Street View was already available since 2014 but only for the desktop version, so now it is a novelty to be able to do it also from the Google Maps apps for iOS and Android. To do so, just click on the screen of the mobile or tablet in the Street View mode of Google Maps.
In the menu that appears will have to select the option “View more data” and will be available the “historical” view of the appearance that over the last few years (since 2007) presented that street… provided that information was recorded at the time, of course.
Now this update in image acquisition will be more and more frequent thanks, precisely, to the aforementioned new more compact and lighter cameras. Among other things, they will allow them to be attached to cars that do not need to be vehicles dedicated solely to this task, as those that until now have been performing it, equipped with large, heavy and complex multi-camera systems.
In addition, the new cameras are equipped with higher quality sensors, so the result will also be reflected in a better definition of the images obtained. The new cameras are equipped with seven panoramic lenses with 140 megapixels of resolution and, although they do not have LIDAR sensors, they are ready to be added if necessary.