Having invested in a lot of data gathering systems, Google cannily offered its services gratis to government departments like tourism and archeology as part of its cultural outreach: by 2015, some 50 Indian monuments from the Taj Mahal and Red Fort to Shaniwar Wada in Pune and Fort St George Chennai, could be viewed in walk-through 360-degree imagery. If you wanted to see what a stunning improvement in navigation such views provided, one had to go to Singapore which was the last country to enable the Google apps. With no solution in sight, Google called off the India editions of Street View. Saner elements in civil society tried to argue that the Street View cameras recorded only what anyone could see on public roads: they had no way to peep behind the high walls of any security establishment.īut the wheels of bureaucracy turned at snail’s pace 11 years ago and there was much to-and-fro messaging between city officials and central ministries like home and defence. It went on for a day or two, then was stopped by the police, who began rather belatedly to assess the security implications. Since 2007, the company has been offering a plug-in feature with Google Maps that converts flat street maps into 360-degree three-dimensional images which add greatly to the ease of navigation.īy 2011 when the company decided to enhance its India street maps with this new tool – Street View – some 27 cities world-wide already offered this feature: on Google Maps, you looked for a small icon called the PegMan and activated it to switch to a 3-D view of the street which you could swing through 360 degrees.Īfter a big media launch in the car park area of Google’s Bengaluru centre, in May 2011, the two platforms fitted with multiple 3-D cameras – one a car, the other a Trike or three wheeled bicycle (to navigate narrow streets) hit the city’s main roads, gathering the necessary imagery. No one knows this better than Google, whose maps app is arguably the most widely used cartographic tool on, hand-phone, desktop – or vehicle dashboard.
In an age of 360-degree digital cameras and augmented reality imagery on smart phones, flat maps are so passé.
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