San Francisco — Imagine hiking through the Amazon without leaving one’s home! Well, nothing seems out of reach for Google’s popular free online mapping service, which on Wednesday began empowering people to explore portions of the Amazon Basin from the comfort of their homes.
Initially, last August, a team of Google Street View adventurers embarked on to explore the Amazon. In fact, in honor of World Forest Day, the web giant has released more than 50,000 images of the world’s largest tropical rainforest–more than a billion acres of lush jungle teeming with abundant animal life–that it has collected over the past several months of the Amazon’s Rio Negro Reserve are now available for anyone to view on Google Maps.
The images went live Wednesday and were announced on Google’s Official Blog in honor of World Forest Day.
Even while resting comfortably in your living room, “Take a virtual boat ride down the primary section of the Rio Negro, and float up into the smaller tributaries where the forest is flooded,” project lead for Google Street View in the Amazon Karin Tuxen-Bettman wrote in a statement. “Stroll along the paths of Tumbira, the largest community in the Reserve… Enjoy a hike through along an Amazon forest trail and see where Brazil nuts are harvested.”
The project was kicked-off a year ago when the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation partnered with Google and invited the tech company to visit the area, to photograph the Rio Negro Reserve and numerous tributaries.
A handful of the company’s employees traveled to the Amazon basin and started accumulating ground-level images of the rivers, forest, and communities in the Rio Negro Reserve. The photos were then “stitched” together to create 360-panoramic views of long stretches of river, vast forests and riverside villages extending from Tumbira near Manuas, the capital city of Amazonas, to Terra Preta. The Street View trike was peddled from dirt trails in the jungle into civilization, so no matter where you live, you can see what life is like in the Amazon.
Amazon River as seen through Google’s new Street View project. (Credit: Google)
“We hope this Street View collection provides access to this special corner of the planet that many of us otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to experience,” Tuxen-Bettman said.
“We are delighted to help everyone from researchers and scientists to armchair explorers around the world learn more about the Amazon and better understand how local communities there are working to preserve this unique environment for future generations.”
Moreover, “Trikes,” the camera-mounted three wheelers typically equipped to capture street scenes for Google online maps, were launched in August from Tumbira in a first-ever project to let Internet users virtually explore the world’s largest river, its wildlife and its communities.
A Google team member rides a Trike with a 360-degree camera system on it, to record the “Street View for the Amazon” (AFP/File, Evaristo Sa)
As a matter of fact, Google has recently taken its Street View cameras to Russia, of post-tsunami Japan, several famous parks both in the United States and abroad, and Israel, among other locations. The cameras have also been of violating the privacy of those whose images have been captured on film.
{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”}http://www.youtube.com/embed/3Q8nIHDxfp0{/iframe}