Google’s Street View has gone live Rwanda with people now able to travel virtually through the streets of Kigali city effective Monday.
Besides virtual exploration, Street View is also critical to mapping efforts letting people see the most up-to-date information about the world while laying the foundation for a more immersive, intuitive map.
The project that has already started in Kenya, South Africa, and Senegal is targeting 100 more countries.
Rwanda is the eleventh country to be added on the list.
The images through Street View can be accessed by people from different places in the world.
It aims at making Google maps more effective and user-friendly by adding nearly 300,000 images enabling people to virtually explore and
navigate destinations.
According to the Ministry of ICT and Innovation, Google is collecting Street Views across Kigali, the scope includes coverage of the entire city, where permissible, and plans to continue beyond Kigali, plans are still to be confirmed.
The Director General of Innovation and Emerging Technologies at the Ministry of ICT, Esther Nkunda, said that “the imagery that has been collected so far in Kigali is now live on google maps. You can go to Google Maps or Google Earth and use the Street View layer to see the coverage across the city.”
She said that with the Street View imagery collected, users from around the world can now virtually travel through Rwanda, adding that this is a great way to promote the country’s tourism and enabling more accurate google maps.
According to Google the world is evolving, and places are constantly changing. New roads are added, buildings are built, and new businesses are opened all the time.
The Google Maps team is to accurately model and reflect this ever-evolving world, and they are often asked how we make a map that does that.
CU/as/APA