The Street View on Russia

Welcome to Russia! You can now virtually travel through the world’s largest country to the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg using Google Maps Street View.

Take an online stroll around famous Red Square and Moscow Kremlin, or go to outskirts of Moscow to wander around the beautiful Tsaritsino or Kuskovo parks. You can also visit the former site of the palace in Kolomenskoye, once considered the 8th World Wonder.


Red Square, Moscow


St. Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia and northernmost megapolis in the world, was once a country capital, and the history of this young city started with The Peter and Paul Fortress. Today, the entire historical center of St. Petersburg is a UNESCO Heritage Site that you can enjoy via Street View.


Historical Center, St. Petersburg


Within St. Petersburg, you can see the great palaces and parks that Russian emperors and nobles built, with Peterhof being its crown jewel. In fact, whole southern shore on the Gulf of Finland consists of palaces and parks including Peterhof, the Oranienbaum, and Alexandria.


 

Peterhof, St. Petersburg

We hope you enjoy your virtual trip to Russia, and look forward to sharing more countries, cultures and sites as Street View continues to expand to more places. For a demo on how Street View works, start here.

Also, if you have a story to share about a place in Russia, find it in Street View and share it on Google+ with the #streetview.

Google Street View is mapping Bulgarian streets soon

Google is now ready to finally begin touring the streets of Bulgarian cities and towns, a report by website dnevnik.bg claimed on February 14.

Google Street View, which offers panoramic views from a particular spot alongside a street, can be used both through Google Maps and Google Earth applications.

It was unclear which cities Google’s camera cars will tour first, but the list of destinations included all the major cities – Sofia, Varna and Plovdiv – as well as about 70 towns. The list included all of Bulgaria’s major winter (Borovets, Bansko, Pamporovo) and summer resorts (Slunchev Bryag, Zlatni Pyassutsi, Balchik and Sozopol, among others), as well as historical towns like Koprivshtitsa and Melnik.

As is in other countries, Google will blur out faces and licence plates of cars caught on camera. Separately, people will have the option to ask Google to blur out photos of their property if they so desire.

The report did not specify an expected date for when street views of Bulgarian cities and towns would be available, given that it will take several months to process the photos and string them together.

The New Google Earth 6.2

We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+.


A seamless globe

The Google Earth globe is made from a mosaic of satellite and aerial photographs taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. Because of this variance, views of the Earth from high altitude can sometimes appear patchy.

Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.

Grand Canyon before and after

Sri Lanka before and after

Share your explorations with Google+

Google Earth is a great way to virtually explore the globe, whether revisiting old haunts or checking out a future vacation spot. With the Google Earth 6.2 update, we’ve added the option to share a screenshot of your current view in Google Earth through Google+. If you’ve already upgraded to Google+, you can share images of the places you’ve virtually traveled to with your Circles, such as family, friends or your local hiking club. To try this new feature, simply sign in to your Google Account in the upper right hand corner of Google Earth and click “Share.” Images of mountains, oceans, deserts, 3D cities, your favorite pizza shop on Street View—you can now experience all these amazing places around the world with people on Google+.


Search improvements

We’ve also made some updates to the search feature in Google Earth. Aside from streamlining the visual design of the search panel, we’ve enabled the same Autocomplete feature that’s available on Google Maps. We’ve also introduced search layers, which will show all the relevant search results (not just the top ten), so now, when looking for gelato in Milano, you can see all the tasty possibilities. Finally, we’ve added biking, transit and walking directions, so if you’re itching for a change of scenery or looking for a new route for your regular commute, you can now use Google Earth to generate and visualize all your options.

via: Google Lat Long blog