A while back, Google began including user photos in Google Maps that could be viewed while a user navigated through street view. On a separate occasion, Google added some new zooming functionalities to Street View.
Now the company has brought these two features together to let users choose which photos they want to view for applicable destinations, and zoom in on those, rather than only being able to zoom in on the default image. This is demonstrated in the following short clip.
When an image is shown in the photo viewer, a small set of “zoom polygons” are shown. This means that there are close-up photos available.
“Subsequently, moving the mouse around in the window highlights the best polygon near the mouse location,” explains Daniel Filip, Computer Vision Tech Lead at Google Zürich. “Similar to our new smart navigation feature, double clicking on the shaded rectangle jumps you to the corresponding photo. After one or more jumps, the back button appears next to the photo title to give you the option to move back through the selected sequence of photos.”
The addition of this feature might inspire photographers to submit more user photos to Google, because Google surely wants to expand upon this feature greatly. I don’t know how many locations feature this functionality, but I would imagine there is still a lot of ground to cover.
