Google Maps is becoming more and more useful inside

Jul 10, 2012 21:10 GMT  ·  By

It's been almost a year since Google introduced interior maps. The is most at home on a mobile device and, ever since, Google has been adding more and more locations, some it got on its own some it got with help from the owners.

Now, it's adding a new batch of locations, one that are in desperate need of a better navigation system, museums.

Google just announced that the complete interior maps of over twenty museums in the US are available in Google Maps. It's a small step, but it's an important one.

"In the past, navigating through museums could be an art form in and of itself. But Google Maps for Android has got wayfinding inside your favorite museums down to a science," Google explained.

"With indoor maps and walking directions for U.S. museums now available on your Android phone or tablet, you can plan your route from exhibit to exhibit, identifying points of interest along the way, including between floors," it said.

Though it started out small, Google now boasts some 10,000 interior locations in Google Maps and the list keeps growing.

It's nowhere near the number of places it's got covered in the "outside" Google Maps, it's got virtually all the places since the entire planet is covered, at varying levels of detail.

But inside locations are much harder to map, it's not like you can take snapshots of them from outer space.

"Today, we’ve added more than twenty popular U.S. museums to our collection of over 10,000 indoor maps that we launched in November: the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and 17 Smithsonian museums—plus a zoo," Google listed the new places.

Google is expanding beyond the US too, the first interior maps have popped up in the UK and the company is asking businesses interested in joining the program to submit floor plans for conversion.