Google Maps just got a colorful upgrade
Like Dorothy in Oz, Google Maps is about to get a lot more colorful.
Starting Tuesday, Google Maps on desktop and mobile will feature more color and visual features in 220 countries. Google Maps covers 98 percent of the world with high-definition satellite imagery.
With more colors, like dark green for a dense forest and light green for a patch of shrubs, it will be easier to tell what you're looking at. The new colors will be algorithmically applied to certain features over the equivalent of 18 billion football fields of land.
Different shades and colors (white for snow and ice, tan for desert and rocky land) better show the type of terrain and also clearly display the borders to national parks and other parks and spaces.
On this beach, it's now easier to distinguish sandy shores from green vegetative areas, even on nearby islands:
Detailed street maps are coming out in the next few months for London, New York, and San Francisco. That means sidewalks, crosswalks, and even pedestrian islands will be much more clearly defined, useful for people who are walking or biking more during the pandemic.
Other cities and urban centers will get the street-level details eventually.
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Topics Google
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
