Thailand — Google Inc., today officially unleashed its panoramic Street View service for Thailand, releasing online a vast collection of panoramic street-level images of the streets of Bangkok, the resort island of Phuket and the northern city of Chiang Mai, as part of the country’s efforts to show tourist hot spots have recovered from last year’s floods.
Now for the first time, Google is exposing gorgeous, pleasure seeking, 360-degree images of people, beaches, entertainment zones, hotels, homes, temples and other scenes in the streets of Bangkok, the resort island of Phuket and the northern city of Chiang Mai, for travelers to take a panoramic tour before they even get there.
Street View allows users to click through a seamless view of streets via the company’s Google Maps website. The move is part of the country’s attempts to show tourist hot spots that have recovered from last year’s floods.
Amy Kunrojpanya, Google’s head of communications and public affairs in Thailand, told Southeast Asia Real Time that the Mountain View, California-based company sped up its efforts to finish the project after massive floods hit Thailand in late 2011. She said the company wanted users to be able to view tourist sites up close and see that things have now returned to normal after the inundation.
A Google Street View image shows Bangkok’s Grand Palace in Thailand.
The move also indicates something of a change of fortunes for Google itself, which has weathered several storms in Asia over its mapping products. So, now anyone in the world can go online and, for free, glance at Google’s pictures, which are ‘digitally stitched’ together to offer a movable journey through Thailand’s three famous tourism hotspots–including countless shots of Thais and foreigners unaware they have been photographed.
This means that anyone with a Web connection can now effortlessly view high resolution images of everything from Bangkok street food stalls to the ornate spires of the city’s Grand Palace. There are also images of the northern city of Chiang Mai and the southern beach resort of Phuket.
“Basically, when we worked with the Tourism Authority of Thailand before we even started driving, the objective for us was how are we going to use the technology we have for Street View to promote tourism and to find great images of Thailand to share with the rest of the world,” says Kunrojpanya.
Snapshot of a Google Maps Street View search for Khao San Road.
As a matter of fact, “There are some of the more colorful nightlife areas of Thailand. We are driving during the daytime, so I think that is probably one point as well, I would say, that helps. You get everyday life. You see the guys who are making fried chicken on the side of the road. You can see people eating mangos and sticky rice.”
Thailand has become the 35th nation to get its own Street View service, and it is just the second country in Southeast Asia after Singapore. Google hopes its newest Street View portal will emphasize the paradises and delights of Thailand, and lure more tourists to enjoy the lusciousness this Southeast Asian tropical land offers.
“We drove Phuket, Chiang Mai and Greater Bangkok and we got 95 percent of those areas, and have images that are 360-degree panoramas,” says David Marx, global communications and public affairs manager for Google Asia Pacific.
“Tourists within Thailand and outside of Thailand can use this as kind of a tool to plan their trips and to virtually explore Thailand,” he added.
Google has been working to map the three Thai locations since September 2011. Tourists and residents can wander as long as they like on a virtual tour, or take just one minute to find where they want to go right now, Marx says.
A shot of Bangkok’s Ananda Samakhom Throne Hall, as shown on Google Street View.
To ease privacy concerns, Google says it has obscured images of individuals’ faces and vehicle license plates. One Twitter user pointed out, though, that this was taken to the extreme: In one image, even the famous faces of Manchester United players who appear in a bus stop advertisement have been blurred.
Google Street View is available here or visitors can go to http://maps.google.co.th/.