Google, the search giant, announced today about the incredible feature added in worldwide used Google Maps. Apart from the terrain exploration, search giant raises the horizons by adding the very first underwater panoramic images to Google Maps. Even if the users don’t know swimming or scuba diving, they can now explore and experience six of the ocean’s most incredible living coral reefs with this feature.
However at present the experience is confined to the Great Barrier Reef and popular underwater spots around Hawaii and the Philippines. The footage that is used in the maps was captured by divers for The Catlin Seaview Survey. They used a special camera called the SVII, swam at 4 kilometers an hour to capture the stunning footage.
According to Google blog post, “Starting today, you can use Google Maps to find a sea turtle swimming among a school of fish, follow a manta ray and experience the reef at sunset—just as I did on my first dive in the Great Barrier Reef last year. You can also find out much more about this reef via the World Wonders Project, a website that brings modern and ancient world heritage sites online. At Apo Island, a volcanic island and marine reserve in the Philippines, you can see an ancient boulder coral, which may be several hundred years old. And in the middle of the Pacific, in Hawaii, you can join snorkelers in Oahu’s Hanauma Bay and drift over the vast coral reef at Maui’s Molokini crater.
But apart from all the above links it’s hard to find places that can be explored. Seaview spots are marked with an orange circle that’s only revealed when the Street View icon is dragged onto the map. Even then, these spots only show up when the map is zoomed in nearly all the way.
Ready to explore the ocean? Check out this video:[tube] 7syWPIZt9B4[/tube]
