Google launched a new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to give users a more real-life look at the places they’re going before they even go. The new Immersive View is sort of a Street View in the sky: you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighborhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to hit up. — The Verge

When most people think of the Arabian peninsula, they think of the opulent man-made islands of Dubai and that city’s sparking, futuristic towers... But with his series Crossings, Arko Datto shifts the attention to the millions of migrant workers from throughout Asia who are building these structures.

Datto used Google Maps and Google Earth to capture the vast highways, sprawling landscapes, and grand projects that laborers have built under conditions that border on slavery. — Wired

So will Apple’s version of street-based imagery simply be a direct copy of Street View? Possibly not. A patent filed back in 2013 mentions “3D Position Tracking for Panoramic Imagery Navigation,” and the filing is disparaging of existing imaging software, calling it a “tedious experience,” though it doesn’t mention Google Street View by name. — venturebeat.com

Welcome, Player 1! You can now play the classic arcade game PAC-MAN in Google Maps with streets as your maze. Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, (and Clyde!) as you swerve the streets of some famous places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while. — googlemaps.com

On a recent visit to Mountain View, I got a peek at how the Google Maps team assembles their maps and refines them with a combination of algorithms and meticulous manual labor—an effort they call Ground Truth. The project launched in 2008, but it was mostly kept under wraps until just a couple years ago. It continues to grow, now covering 51 countries, and algorithms are playing a bigger role in extracting information from satellite, aerial, and Street View imagery. — wired.com

Two months ago, after much lobbying by the biggest satellite company in North America, DigitalGlobe, the US government relaxed restrictions to allow for commercially available satellite imagery up to 25 cm resolution—twice as detailed as the previous limit of 50 cm [...] The extra sharp images from Worldview-3 will greatly increase the maps' level of detail to the point where it can make out 10-inch objects, which means Google will soon be able to see “manholes and mailboxes” [...] — Motherboard

In 2013, we picture cities a little differently, with demography and photography. Cities live in Instagram, in patterns of light from space, in blueprints and visualizations and—most like Canaletto’s civic landscapes—on Google Street View.

Now, an artist in London has done some creative, comparative history, pairing Canaletto’s Venice and London with contemporary depictions, as glimpsed by the Google van. — theatlantic.com

Google's Street View is slowly covering more and more of the world's surface, but it still has holes. Now though, you can help fill them—and all you need is an Android phone or DSLR.

Google has just launched a new Street View feature which allows any user to recreate the usual Street View experience by stringing together photo spheres along paths which they define. — Gizmodo

Google today launched an interactive map featuring Street Views of over 65 mass-transit hubs. The map features some locations you may have already explored, like Emirates' A380 or London's Gatwick Airport, alongside some new sites across Europe, South America, and Asia. — theverge.com

The latest update brings 25 million new building footprints to Google Maps, making Google’s map offering even more detailed and comprehensive.

The new building footprints have been created by a computer, which processed actual aerial imagery and rendered the shapes of buildings in the maps.

Users can help out and fix inaccurate building footprints in Google Map Maker, as well as assign businesses to existing buildings or even draw the entire building footprints themselves. — mashable.com

It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. — theatlantic.com

Wojcicki said the new campus — three adjacent buildings including Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars Building — would also help Google attract candidates from area colleges and universities... The company's focus on Web search is evoked by the iconic binocular sculpture at the site, created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. — latimes.com