Mountain View, California — Hold on your breathe a nice surprise from Google’s Maps team: Google on Friday, just like Gmail Labs, unveiled a cool new set of innovative add-ons to its popular mapping service that offers a multitude of new ways to explore places near and far. A Labs feature for Maps, which currently includes nine optional add-ons to the popular mapping service. Now, Google Maps users can finally join in on the fun with experimental features via Google Labs.
“Google Maps Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that are not quite ready for prime-time. They may change, break or disappear at any time,” Google wrote.
The company has had great marvels with similar features in Gmail, Google Reader, and other services, for years now. But somehow, Google Maps was left neglected.
To access Google Maps Labs, the process is similar to Gmil, simply click on the green flask icon on the top right-hand bar of Google Maps. A pop-up window will provide details on possible add-ons, right now, there are nine new test features awaits (all disabled by default):
Here is a breakdown of the nine features we have available so far: Click “Enable” or “Disable” next to the feature, save, and you are ready to go.
- Drag ‘n’ Zoom: After clicking the Drag ‘n’ Zoom button, you can choose a specific region of the map, and lets you draw a box on the map to immediately zoom into that place and drag and zoom.
- Aerial Imagery: Is available only for specific places and offers high-resolution overhead imagery of the country.
- Back To Beta: Replaces the “beta” tag back into the Maps logo. (It is a novelty, but Google already offers it for other services as well.)
- Where in the World Game: A game that tests your knowledge of world geography by asking you to identify countries based on satellite imagery.
- Rotatable Maps: Allows you to flip maps to other directions so that North is not always up on the top of the map.
- What’s Around Here?: Adds a second search button that searches for “*” — basically everything near your current location.
- LatLng Tooltip: A nice feature that displays the latitude and longitude right below your mouse cursor.
- LatLng Marker: Adds the ability to drop a pin to mark latitude and longitude from the right-click context menu.
- Smart Zoom: Prevents you from zooming in too far into a map so you don’t get the dreaded “We do not have imagery at this zoom level” message.
You can fiddle around with these features and more in Google Maps Labs by enabling each feature individually. If any feature breaks, and you’re having trouble loading Maps, use the escape hatch.