14 DAY TRIAL // Google is debuting a very interesting project, another one coming from the new but exciting Google Cultural Institute. The World Wonders Project, as the name suggests, aims to highlight the great wonders of the Earth, both natural and man-made, though with an emphasis on the latter.
Ancient sites such as Stonehenge, Roman ruins and medieval architecture are all part of the new project. In total, 132 sites from 18 countries are included in the project.
As you may have guessed, 360-degree imagery is available for them all, courtesy of Street View technology.
"The World Wonders Project goes outdoors to bring online icons from all times and places, and from all over civilizations all over the world. It features 132 historic sites in 18 countries, from prehistoric Stonehenge to Ancient Rome’s vanished Pompeii and the mystical wooden Kyoto temples," Google writes.
"The sites are natural as well as man-made, ranging from the sandy dunes of Australia’s Shark Bay to the rocky cliffs of America’s Yosemite National Park," it adds.
The new site, dedicated to the project, makes it easy to explore all of the wonderful places and dive right into them. It's easy to find them too, there's a very cool looking 3D black globe, courtesy of HTML5 Canvas and CSS3, which you can use to navigate around the world and pick the locations you want.
You can also navigate by region, via a drop-down menu, or by theme via another drop-down menu. These options should be more than enough to help you find the places you know about and discover ones you don't.
Google sent the Street View trike to all of these locations to grab the angles Street View cars could not. The Google Cultural Institute is really starting to pick up Steam, after creating a site for the exploration of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a historical archive of Nelson Mandela footage, photos and documents, and more recently, greatly expanding the Google Art Project which displays works of art from several museums around the world in high resolution imagery. .
