14 DAY TRIAL // Street View can be great for showing your friends where you grew up or exploring a location online before visiting it. But apart from its utilitarian nature, the site can also be a great way of exploring famous landmarks and interesting locations around the world regardless if you plan on visiting them soon or not. Google has been working on adding interesting locations to Street View apart from all the cities it already sports and has now partnered with UNESCO to include images from World Heritage sites in the service.
“[T]he Street View team has been working with tourist agencies, the public and partners from across the world to bring a new kind of imagery to Street View, focusing on putting tourist spots and iconic cultural landmarks on the map in all their 360 degree beauty,” Kenzo Fong Hing of Google London wrote. “As part of this effort, we're delighted to be announcing a global alliance with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to put imagery of World Heritage sites into Street View.”
Google will visit World Heritage sites selected in accordance with UNESCO, from the countries where Street View is currently available or gathering images. Google says locations from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, US and a number of European countries will be added to Street View in the future. Shooting all of these sites requires quite a bit of planning and there is a lot of work to be done until these images become available online so it may be months, or even years in some cases, before they'll be added.
For now though, Google has 19 locations from around Europe already available to virtual tourists which fancy a bit of culture. Google has set up a site dedicated to these and the upcoming locations. Among the locations, you'll see some of the best-known and interesting places in Europe, from the Banks of the Seine in Paris, to the ancient city of Pompei in Italy and even Stonehendge.