Now You Can Visit Petra Through Google Street View
Who doesn’t have Petra on their bucket list? We’d love to pay Jordan a visit and enjoy the magical kingdom in the heart of the Middle East, but you know how we get stuck at work for months or how we all have that one friend who procrastinated and was too late to get the visa.
Well, Google just announced the launch of spectacular 360-degree Street View imagery of Petra.
“People all over the world now have a window into our magical Kingdom in the heart of the Middle East,” wrote Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan in a blog post about the launch. “It is a great taster of what visitors can expect when they come to Jordan”
She added that this technology also “provides a lens on the past. And when we understand more about each other’s stories and cultures and histories, we realize that we are more alike than we are different. That’s why we must preserve these treasures for future generations. They’re a doorway to our shared narrative.”
To capture the images, Google used the Trekker, which is a wearable Street View backpack with a camera system on top. The Trekker is designed to be able to traverse through footpaths and narrow pathways in order to reach areas of natural beauty or historical sites.
The Street View camera uses technology that takes 360-degree photos with motion sensors, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system and lasers (depending on the devices used) to capture 3D data to determine distances.
This is the fifth Street View imagery collected of a major landmark in MENA, after Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Liwa desert in Abu Dhabi and the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.
The other five sites captured on Google Street View in Egypt include Saqqara, the Hanging Church, Cairo Citadel, Citadel of Qaitbay and Abu Mena.
Jordan’s historical landmarks also now join other world sites on Street View, such as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, and natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Antarctica and the Alps.
The imagery of the 30 historical sites and other sites is now available on Google Maps and can be viewed on g.co/Jordanhighlights and g.co/Petra.
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