Offline mapping for Android phones, Street View for nature trails and 3D Google Earth maps are all improvements coming to Google Maps in the near future.
The three new features were unveiled by company executives at a press event at the company’s San Francisco offices.
Offline mapping will become a part of Google’s “own global base map” and offer hi-res navigation without needing a WiFI or 3G or 4G connection. To use the feature, users will have to select the area they plan to visit before going offline, then download the map to their device.
The familiar GPS tracking blue dot will still be there to help with navigation.
Street View for walkable locations will take the popular feature beyond the streets, railroads and rivers that have already been covered. It’s possible because the Street View cameras have gotten smaller, and now come in the form of a wearable backpack weighing about 40 pounds.
3D Google Earth mapping also comes with the introduction of a new user interface called Tour Guide. The feature will allow users to choose a location, then take virtual flyover of modeled representations of locations and attractions. The company is “trying to create magic,” in the words of Google Earth product manager Peter Birch.
A demo of the 3D flyover effect was fairly mesmerizing. It’s made possible by a fleet of Google-owned planes that fly over cities with custom-designed camera systems to take shots from a number of angles and vantage points that are later stitched together to create 3D models of the images.
The feature is expected to be available for a number of cities and communities with a cumulative population of 300 million people in the “next several weeks” for both Android and iOS.
It’s interesting that Google made its big announcement a week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple is expected by many to use that event to unveil its own 3D mapping service and drop
Google Maps as a featured application for the iPhone and iPad with the introduction if iOS 6.
Apple has used Google Maps since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.
Unfortunately, Wednesday’s event was heavy on hype and light on announcements. It featured an extensive history of Google’s mapping efforts. A couple relatively minor announcements about Street View cars having driven 5 million unique miles and a British charity using Google Earth to aid its work prefaced the three new features.
Apple dropping Google Maps in iOS 6 will be a relatively significant blow for Google if the predictions prove accurate. Google would lose location based data for mobile iOS users, in turn hurting its ability to sell locally targeted ads.
The two tech giants have had an increasingly tense relationship since Google launched its Android operating system to compete with the iPhone in 2008.
Now Google has made its preemptive strike in the two companies’ map-based battle in a clear move to get ahead of the story before Tim Cook’s WWDC keynote next week.
