Watch The World in 3D with Google Maps New Tool

Google has finally announced the 3D Photo Tours on Google Maps. This is basically "a collection of public Panoramio and Picasa images of well-known landmarks arranged into 3D Panoramic tours."These photo tours, as stated in Google's official blog, are available in more than 15.000 sites around the world. To access them, you need to make sure you have a modern browser that supports Web GL technology.

Using 3D Photo Tours, users will be able to take a tour of places like the Grand Canyon, Buckingham Palace, Fenway Park, Trevi Fountain and many more, you can see this list of all the places for which 3D Photo tour is available.

Here is how Google developed 3D Photo Tour :
"To produce these photo tours, we use advanced computer vision techniques to create a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panaromio photos. We start by finding clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks. From the photos, our system derives the 3D shape of each landmark and computes the location and orientation of each photo. Google Maps then selects a path through the best images, and adds 3D transitions to seamlessly guide you from photo to photo as if you’re literally flying around the landmark and viewing it from different perspectives. "

Watch this video to learn more about 3D Photo Tour