Google’s immersive Street View offers glimpse of ‘metaverse’By Glenn CHAPMAN / AFP, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CaliforniaFifteen years after its launch, a Google Maps feature that lets people explore faraway places as though standing right there is providing a glimpse of the “metaverse” being heralded as the future of the Internet. Google global communications associate Sofia Abdirizak, left, measures a Street View camera for a journalist during a press event at the Google Street View Garage in Mountain View, California, on Monday. “He was talking to some of his colleagues at the time, saying: ‘I bet we can do something with this.’ That was the start of Street View,” Silverman said. Street View lets people click on locations in Google Maps to see what it might look like were they at that spot, and even look around. Now, the Internet behemoth is introducing an “immersive view” that fuses Street View images with artificial intelligence to create “a rich, digital model of the world,” Google Maps experiences vice president Miriam Daniel wrote online.
