Google’s Street View — which gives a 360 degree panoramic view of landmarks and such prominent places – isn’t available for India, though it is in many countries, enabling us to virtually walk through cities and villages of the world; and also see, for example, the Swiss Alps, the Amazon River and London’s National Gallery.
Soon, we will have an oceanic variant, called Seaview. Thanks to technology, we will be able to dive underwater and get a breathtaking view of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Google in collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Project will help us explore the Great Barrier Reef – the world’s largest coral reef system located in Coral Sea off Queensland in the northeast of Australia.
The images will come from a specially-developed SVII camera, that takes 360-degree images every 4–6 seconds while dragging a diver along at 4km/h.
The SVI camera used for testing
To give us an idea of what we might see in the 50,000 panoramas that are expected from the expedition, a small sampler from Heron island has been uploaded to the Catlin Seaview Survey site, which already shows us some of the amazing beauty of the reef.
