You can now take photos for Street View with your cell phone

collaborate with the Google Street View, which is that “street view” of the Google Maps, just got a little more accessible. Is that Google announced, on its official blog, that users will be able to take photos and post them in the resource collection using only the cell phone.

This new feature is part of an update (beta) of the Google Maps app to Android smartphones. The only requirement to use it is that the cell phone is compatible with the Arcore, which is Google's augmented reality technology. If your phone runs Android 7.0 (Nougat) or higher, it supports this feature.

At this first moment, this novelty is available in Canada (in Toronto), USA (in New York and Austin), Nigeria, Indonesia and Costa Rica. The idea is to expand this new collaboration possibility for Street View to more regions soon, according to Google.

See below for more details on how this new feature works and why it is relevant:

How to take photos for Street View?

The entire process of taking the photos and posting them to the Street View will roll in the app Google Maps. The app will automatically collage photos in sequence, which gives that impression of Street View movement when you click on the forward or backward arrows.

When opening a location and selecting the Street View option, a tab called “Create” will appear. Then you select “Connected Photos” to start your image capture. After tapping the button to start capturing, just walk and the app will do the rest. See this process in the gif below:

The idea of ​​this update is mainly to help Street View reach more remote places, where employees and those Google cars full of paraphernalia couldn't reach. As much as those 360º cameras used by the folks at Google can capture more accurate images for Street View, nowadays Android smartphones that are compatible with ARCore are capable of taking photos that are not far behind.

This collaborative format will also allow local information stay up to date, even in places Google has already been. This is the case of New York, for example. The photos that people take there will help keep Google's information bank up to date on businesses, opening hours and the like (which are things that change quickly). In these cases, the company explained that it will prioritize the images captured by its equipment and use the information that is visible in the photos taken by users.

The company also said it will use the same privacy and security controls from the images captured by your equipment to the images captured by people for Street View. The most well-known among these security measures is blurring the faces of people and license plates that appear in photos.

This new Street View feature has been tested in Brazil, Japan and Nigeria. But there is still no more specific information and predictions about when this update should arrive here.

If you liked this possibility brought by ARCore, also take a look at this another Google app that uses this technology to show you if you're complying with social distancing the right way.

Sources: Google's official blog, Tech Crunch e The Verge

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