The cityscapes will be introduced initially into the Google Earth apps for Android and iOS, with the desktop version getting them at a later point. 'We're very proud of how far we've come in comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability.' 3D cityscapesģD is the most attention-grabbing announcement today, although it's worth re-stressing that it's part of the Google Earth mobile apps, not Google Maps. 'There's a lot going on in mapping right now, and we wanted to be able to tell our story,' added Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Maps, in a follow-up conference call with a group of European journalists. 'It's covering a number of things that we've been doing, and perhaps haven't talked about as much as we should have done,' said Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, in an interview with The Guardian. Not that Google is framing the news in terms of any rivalry with Apple. Some big announcements, just days before WWDC. Meanwhile, an initiative called Google Street View Trekker will send rucksack-toting Googlers off to photograph places that aren't accessible to Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles, while Google is expanding its Map Maker tool to 12 new countries for people to help improve the accuracy of its maps – although this doesn't include the UK yet. The 3D cityscapes will roll out in Google Earth mobile apps, while the Android version of Google Maps will get the ability to download maps for offline usage in more than 100 countries in the coming weeks. Google has four separate pieces of mapping news.

Google 3d map view