Immersive View Everywhere, All at Once

Paul J - Feb 04, 2025

Beyond Street View: The Rise of Immersive Cities

Immersive View represents a significant leap in how we interact with digital maps, evolving from Google's early Stanford CityBlock project to today's blend of 2D/3D data, user content, and virtual tours. This technology is rapidly expanding, bringing immersive experiences to major cities and soon, to local neighborhoods and restaurants in places like Minneapolis, offering a richer understanding of our world.

From Street View to Immersive Reality

The idea of Immersive View evolved even before Street View, which originally started as a Stanford CityBlock project back in 2001. Google has continually improved this technology, leading us to today's immersive experiences, including 2D and 3D maps data, user-generated content, and detailed virtual tours.

Google is actively expanding Immersive View to more cities. Major US metros like New York and San Francisco are already benefiting. As more data becomes available, even more locations will be added including many restaurants in neighborhoods currently in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and Las Vegas.

Exploring Your Neighborhood

Want to see if Immersive View is available near you? On your mobile just open Google Maps and search for a restaurant. In some Minneapolis neighborhoods, you'll find restaurants with Immersive Views, with the availablity to add virtual tours. Bonus, weather, time of day, and shadow views are customized for you.

Explore restaurants with immersive and Street View perspectives enhanced by virtual tours.
See nearby landmarks, transit options, and other points of interest.
Experience how the view changes with the time of day.

If you're on a mobile, see a full immersive view profile and tour from Google at a NYC pizzaria.

The Future of Immersive Exploration

Google's goal is to connect the world. Immersive View makes it easy to go from a bird's-eye view (thanks to Google Earth) to a street-level perspective (powered by Street View), often supplemented by Google themselves, user-generated content, or virtual tours... and provide businesses the ability to run a true, mixed-reality (MR) environment.

Imagine Street View images and virtual tours becoming the standard for showcasing businesses.
User contributions and professionally created Google virtual tours will likely play a key role.
Google Trekker appears to be used to create many of these immersive restaurant views, which often include virtual tours.

The Rise of Immersive Experiences

The popularity of Immersive View is part of a bigger trend. We're seeing more and more immersive experiences, including user-generated content and virtual tours, in other areas too and we look forward for the opportunity to integrate them with Immersive View.

Think of the popularity of exhibitions like the Van Gogh Experience, which employ 2D elements into 360 photography..
Consider the impact of shows like "Emily in Paris," which beautifully showcase locations, often inspiring viewers to seek out virtual experiences of those places. Paris has Emily, Minneapolis has Molly!

Immersive Yourself

Localmn Interactive provides virtual tours for restaurants, and other businesses and localities.