Google Maps' AR Mode is almost ready for prime time - and it looks to be the best Maps update yet. The augmented-reality tool uses your phone's camera to 'paint' signs and arrows over your real-world location. In other words, scratching your head at 2D maps could soon be a thing of the past.
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Despite all the convenience and quality of Google’s sprawling ecosystem, some users are fed up with the fishy privacy policies the company has recently implemented in Gmail, Chrome, and other services. To its credit, Google has made good changes in response to user feedback, but that doesn’t diminish the company’s looming shadow over the internet at large.
If you’re ready to ditch Google, or even just reduce its presence in your digital life, this guide is here to help.
Google has been adding the insides of buildings to its Google Maps Street View for years now, and Google Arts & Culture (the program that brought you “find your art doppelgänger”) has been collecting all kinds of art you can see on Street View: Museums, famous architecture, street art, and art exhibits that already closed in real life. Here’s the guide to Google’s virtual art collection.
Flat maps are so 7000 BC. With modern computers, we have the technology to render the world in its true form (ignoring conspiracies): a globe. Or oblate spheroid, if you prefer. Which is why it's a surprise it took Google this long to adopt a rotatable, third-dimension for Maps.
In recent months Google Maps has gotten pretty persistent about letting me know where there are restaurants it thinks I should try or new places opening up in my neighbourhood — and I hate it. As it turns out, I don't really need the app to tell me what's going on around me and with each hot tip I get more and more annoyed.
iOS: Earlier this year, Google teamed up with Nintendo to turn Google Maps into Mario Kart, replacing the app's usual location icon with a fist-bumping plumber riding a red go-kart. The crossover didn't last very long, but Google is now bringing back some of that magic with a new update to the Maps app on iOS.
Google's done more than almost any other company to bring virtual reality to the masses, from making cheap Cardboard headsets to giving the public easy ways to create and share 360-degree photos. Now the company is giving VR fans another way to dive in with a new tool called Tour Creator.
Google's annual I/O developer's conference always provides an exciting swathe of Google-related updates and improvements to their services and so far, it's delivering. Their key messaging this year is solving problems with AI and with the incoming upgrades to Google Maps, their advanced AI and algorithms will help you find things to do, places to eat and organise getting together with your friends.
Back in 2014, Google teamed up with Nintendo to hide Pokemon across Maps. It was surprisingly fun, paving the way for Pokemon GO. Now, the two companies are working together again to transform your turn-by-turn driving directions into a little homage to Mario Kart.