14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re a football fan, there’s probably just one place you’d like to be for the coming month, South Africa. With the world’s best teams fighting for the title of world champion, the action doesn’t get any hotter than this. Of course, if you’re like most fans, you’ll be watching all of it on your TV or down at the local pub. But you can still visit South Africa and some of the competition stadiums with Google Maps and Earth.
“With just days to go before the tournament kicks off, football fans can start soaking up the atmosphere in seven of South Africa’s soccer stadiums, including Soccer City in Johannesburg, Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane and Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban,” Julie Taylor, at Google South Africa, wrote.
“Thanks to some serious pedal-power by our trike riders in South Africa we’ve made available these pitch-level pictures from inside and outside of these stadiums. And we’ve created complete 3D models of all 10 stadiums, as well as many host cities which can be viewed in Google Earth,” she added.
Street View images of seven of the ten stadiums are now live on Google Maps, so you can take the tour in person. All the images were shot with Google’s special Street View trike, which is able to reach places the cars can’t. To make it easy to find all the interesting locations, Google has partnered with the South Africa Tourism. You can visit maps.google.com/exploresouthafrica to check out all the stadiums.
If you're looking for a better perspective, you can also check out the stadiums modeled in three dimensions in high detail. You can visit the locations in Google Earth, Google has provided a 3D tour if you don’t want to search for all of them yourself, but you can also do it with the new Google Maps Earth view.
