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One of Google’s biggest augmented reality investments is Live View. Google Maps is elevating the AR navigation and discovery capability with Google Lens branding.
Live View encompasses a number of AR capabilities. It can provide walking directions with floating arrows and street signs, while visible landmarks are used to orient you. You can also use it to improve location accuracy by scanning your surroundings (tap the blue dot) and finding those sharing their location with you on Pixel phones.
A more recent capability lets you launch Live View to see overlaid information about nearby locations and search for Restaurants, ATMs, Apparel, Shopping, etc.
You launch this from a camera icon in the Google Maps search bar. When this feature was first announced in 2022, a generic camera icon was used. It switched to a single color variant of the Google Lens icon last year, and the full blue, yellow, green, and red version is now in use.
This updated icon is a result of Google renaming “Search with Live View” to “Lens in Map” last October when it announced an expansion to 50 new cities, including Austin, Las Vegas, Rome, São Paulo, and Taipei.
It certainly stands out next to the microphone icon and encourages use. Meanwhile, tapping launches a tutorial.
More on Google Lens:
- ‘Circle to Search’ coming to Pixel 8 & S24 with awkward launch shortcut
- Google Lens simplifies and consolidates into three filters
- Google Assistant rolling out Lens-powered ‘Search screen’ that reliably appears
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