to learn the newest high-tech trends in both industry and product development. YNN Tech Reporter Adam Balkin highlights the coolest and newest apps for your cell phone and mobile device every Thursday and Saturday in your
.
Tech Beat: New Google creation allows viewers to virtually tour natural wonders
To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.
Then come back here and refresh the page.
A hiker took the Google Trekker, complete with its 15 cameras, down to the Grand Canyon in order to capture images for a street view-type tour so that anyone--from just about anywhere--could take a virtual stroll through one of the world's greatest natural wonders.
Google mapped about 75 of the 277 miles of the Grand Canyon, some of the more well-known trails. The team says it does plan to someday head back and capture even more.
"The trekker weighs about 40 pounds or so," Daniel Sieberg with Google said. "It's about two feet clearance off my head here, but it takes pictures about every two-and-a-half seconds or so. As you're going through a trail or something, you could actually just hike at a normal pace, and it's taking pictures and accounting for all of those things like balance and slope and all of those types of things and then connecting that and collaborating all of that later."
As wild as it may seem, there are actually more than half dozen of these street view-type contraptions for capturing images.
"In addition to the car, the trike, the snowmobile, the trolley, which goes through museums, we also have the ability to capture similar types of imagery underwater and we've actually done that in places like the Great Barrier Reef," Sieberg said.
To check out the world's wonders those devices have caught so far, head over to Google.com/Streetview.