Google Street View Now Goes Underwater

It’s happened to everyone. You’re walking around a coastal town using Google Maps to navigate your way from one sandy street to another. (Clearly, you’re not an iPhone 5 user.) Then, maybe you head down to the beach to check out the sand castles and sunbathers, and your futuristic handheld interactive map tells you that there’s an awesome coral reef just a few yards out into the water. But you can’t very well just wade into the water with your pocket computer. It would get ruined! How are you supposed to see the sea turtles and gaze at the brain coral? Looks like Google Maps has lead you down a dead end street.

Nope. Not anymore. Because now Google Maps can take you underwater, all thanks to the its consistently impressive Street View capabilities. In partnership with the Catlin Seaview Survey, a major scientific study of the world’s coral reef systems, Google just unveiled a handful of underwater destinations with panoramic views of the ocean floor and all of the beautiful critters that call it home.

Of course, Google just couldn’t help themselves from turning this Jacques Cousteau moment into an ad for its Android operating system. The Street View team used a new set up that they describe as “the world's first tablet-operated underwater camera.” It’s a custom built spaceship of a thing called the SVII that takes continual 360-degree images, not unlike the devices that Google straps to the top of cars to do the dry land Street View photography. Except this camera has a propeller fixed to one end making it easy for the diver operating it to swim through schools of fish or around deadly obstacles. There’s no need for a shutter button with this camera — it’s controlled by an underwater Android tablet. (The Samsung Galaxy, to be exact.) This allows the scientists to analyze the data they’re collecting while they’re underwater and stream it back to the ship over a WiFi network.

This isn’t just about Google finding a new excuse to issue a press release, though. According to the folks at the Catlin Seaview Survey, giving millions of people access to scope out the treasures under the sea will encourage more people to support underwater conservation. “The biggest problem with the ocean is that it’s out of sight and out of mind for most of us,” Richard Vevers, Project Director at Catlin, told Boing Boing about the project. “99% of people have never gone for a dive and never will. One of the biggest issues around conservation is engaging people with the ocean, and this is a powerful way to accomplish that. It is a scientific project to create a baseline for observing how the oceans are changing, but it also creates awareness of why that matters.”

That sounds a lot like Google’s talking points when they took their Street View cameras to a remote Inuit village in Canada and to the South Pole. Come to think of it, Google’s really been outdoing themselves with these zany Street View projects. They’ve also been to the top of the Alps, the depths of Death Valley and the remote corners of the Amazon. Besides a trip through the fjords of Norway or the jungles of central Africa, we’re pretty Google will have to actually go to space to one-up this latest expedition. They’ve already gotten kinda close!