Google has been introducing many new features to charm the Indian audiences. And their latest idea was to provide a street view to explore cities, tourist spots, hills and river through a 360-degree panoramic imagery. The service was aimed at covering most of the tourist spots of the country giving a beautiful imagery but that does not look possible anymore as the permission is rejected.
In a written reply to Lok Sabha, Union Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said “Google had submitted a proposal on the Google Street View for the government’s permission in July 2015 which allows users to explore places around the world through 360-degree panoramic street-level imagery and view public area.” However, the government has not agreed to the proposal, he said. The company wanted to explore places widely and allow a 3D imagery at the street-level. So whatever that was captured would be posted online. The service has been used widely in foreign locations like US, Canada and many European countries.
Initially, on an experimental basis, Google had enabled the street view feature for some tourist sites. It included the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Qutub Minar, Varanasi river bank, Nalanda University, Mysore Palace, Thanjavur temple and Chinnaswamy stadium, in partnership with the Archaeological Society of India. The Street View technology is a part of Google Maps and Google Earth, that gives panoramic views from positions of many streets. This was launched in the 2007 and has been used in several cities in the US and even in rural areas. While Google has been trying to increase their reach in India, through the inclusion of regional languages and new applications, the street view technology remains far-fetched as of now. Let us see if Google has anything planned in a similar vein to tackle this rejection.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 28, 2018 02:27 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).