Google never ceases to amaze. This time, they’ve gone ahead and hired a camel as part of their popular Street View feature.
The 10-year-old camel, reportedly named Raffia, walked through the desert around Liwa Oasis led by her Indian guide and equipped with a Street View camera mounted on top of her hump to create panoramic views for internet users around the world.
The Liwa Oasis is a 100 kilometer-wide scenic desert, southeast of the city of Abu Dhabi that includes some of the world’s biggest sand dunes. Users are now able to experience a virtual tour, exploring everything from its date farms, to 40-metre-high dunes, to the largest oasis in the Arabian Peninsula. Google’s low-tech solution involves Raffia carrying the “Trekker”, a camera that stands more than a meter high and can easily fit into a backpack. The Trekker is typically carried in a backpack by humans to capture 360-degree views of off street images in places that are inaccessible by its Street View cars, such as everything from narrow alleyways to the Grand Canyon.
Google spokeswoman Monica Baz says the camel, reportedly named Raffia, was an apt way of documenting the beautiful shifting sands of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis.
“With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment.”
“In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way,” Baz said. — CNN
Go on, explore the Liwa Desert.
Google hopes that such Street View features will help boost tourism to certain areas as viewers can “go before they go”. Baz stated, “Twenty to 30 per cent of the views come from outside the country…we think this really helps people check these locations out before they come to visit.”
Find out more from Google about how it works.
#GoogleStreetView #VirtualTour #LiwaDesert #VirtualTourism #RemoteTourism #TGIF
