Tag Archives: Google Maps Platform

Congratulations to the winners of Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge

Posted by Bradford Lee – Product Marketing Manager, Augmented Reality, and Ahsan Ashraf – Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps Platform

In September, we launched Google's Immersive Geospatial Challenge on Devpost where we invited developers and creators from all over the world to create an AR experience with Geospatial Creator or a virtual 3D immersive experience with Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

"We were impressed by the innovation and creativity of the projects submitted. Over 2,700 participants across 100+ countries joined to build something they were truly passionate about and to push the boundaries of what is possible. Congratulations to all the winners!" 

– Shahram Izadi, VP of AR at Google

We judged all submissions on five key criteria:

  • Functionality - How are the APIs used in the application?
  • Purpose - What problem is the application solving?
  • Content - How creative is the application?
  • User Experience - How easy is the application to use?
  • Technical Execution - How well are you showcasing Geospatial Creator and/or Photorealistic 3D Tiles?

Many of the entries are working prototypes, with which our judges thoroughly enjoyed experiencing and interacting. Thank you to everyone who participated in this hackathon.



From our outstanding list of submissions, here are the winners of Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge:


Category: Best of Entertainment and Events

Winner, AR Experience: World Ensemble

Description: World Ensemble is an audio-visual app that positions sound objects in 3D, creating an immersive audio-visual experience.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Realistic Event Showcaser

Description: Realistic Event Showcaser is a fully configurable and immersive platform to customize your event experience and showcase its unique location stories and charm.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: navigAtoR

Description: navigAtoR is an augmented reality app that is changing the way you navigate through cities by providing a 3 dimensional map of your surroundings.



Category: Best of Commerce

Winner, AR Experience: love ya

Description: love ya showcases three user scenarios for a special time of year that connect local businesses with users.



Category: Best of Travel and Local Discovery

Winner, AR Experience: Sutro Baths AR Tour

Description: This guided tour through the Sutro Baths historical landmark using an illuminated walking path, information panels with text and images, and a 3D rendering of how the Sutro Baths swimming pool complex would appear to those attending.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Hyper Immersive Panorama

Description: Hyper Immersive Panorama uses real time facial detection to allow the user to look left, right, up or down, in the virtual 3D environment.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: The World is Flooding!

Description: The World is Flooding! allows you to visualize a 3D, realistic flooding view of your neighborhood.


Category: Best of Productivity and Business

Winner, AR Experience: GeoViz

Description: GeoViz revolutionizes architectural design, allowing users to create, modify, and visualize architectural designs in their intended context. The platform facilitates real-time collaboration, letting multiple users contribute to designs and view them in AR on location.



Category: Best of Sustainability

Winner, AR Experience: Geospatial Solar

Description: Geospatial Solar combines the Google Geospatial API with the Google Solar API for instant analysis of a building's solar potential by simply tapping it.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: EarthLink - Geospatial Social Media

Description: EarthLink is the first geospatial social media platform that uses 3D photorealistic tiles to enable users to create and share immersive experiences with their friends.


Honorable Mentions

In addition, we have five projects that earned honorable mentions:

  1. Simmy
  2. FrameView
  3. City Hopper
  4. GEOMAZE - The Urban Quest
  5. Geospatial Route Check

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all the participants! Check out all the amazing projects submitted. We can't wait to see you at the next hackathon.

#IamaGDE: Joel Humberto Gómez

Banner with image of Joel Humberto Gómez, Google Developer Expert in Googe Maps Platform and Web Technologies

The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers, and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies, and tech communities by speaking at events and publishing content.

Joel Humberto Gómez is an application developer at IBM, writing applications that improve the performance of IBM’s internal organization. While his job focuses on frontend development using React, he also has experience with web development using JavaScript. He has held many technical lead roles, in which he makes technical decisions and product delivery plans. Joel has a Computer Science degree from Universidad Veracruzana and has familiarity with databases, mobile development, web development, networks, and servers. He is a GDE in Web Technologies and Google Maps Platform.

“I’ve been involved in projects related to asset delivery and NFC in mobile development and projects about data visualization and automation processes in companies,” he says. “In 2022, I want to be more involved in the open source community.”

Joel uses Google Maps Platform to visualize data and explore data in projects focused on data visualization. In one project, he used the Maps JavaScript API. In another, he focused on trace routes and visualizing points to recollect and deliver packages. In a third project, he used the Place Autocomplete services and Directions API. Now, he is working on a non-profit project to show some places related with medical services.

Getting involved in the developer community

At university, one of Joel’s instructors organized events related to Linux, like Install Fest, with his students.

“With time, I became one of their students, and he motivated me to share knowledge with others and be brave and go beyond the university and my comfort zone,” Joel says. “I started to organize events and talks and got to know people in other communities.”

Eventually, Gómez became a GDG organizer.

“My chapter was GDG Monterrey,” he says. “We organized an Android Study Jam and some Google I/O Extended events.”

Gómez enjoyed sharing with his community and received encouragement from other GDEs to apply to the GDE program to share his knowledge more widely.

“I love to share with my community, but sometimes the knowledge just stays in your community,” he says. “Diego DeGranda, a GDE specializing in web technologies, encouraged me to apply and go beyond my community to share with communities outside of my country.”

As a GDE, Gómez has met other developers from around the world, with whom he talks about technology and shares experiences. Another benefit of being a GDE is the opportunity to learn from other GDEs and Google employees.

“In 2020, I had more activities, because location wasn’t a limitation anymore,” he said. “For speakers, virtual meetings are sometimes complicated, but we are adapting to this situation and using and creating tools to get and provide a better experience.”

Favorite Google Maps Platform features

Gómez’ favorite Google Maps Platform feature is the Local Context API.

“I think it’s a cool feature and has a lot of potential to create better applications,” he says. “I have some projects where Local Context helps me with some features, and I don’t need to develop by myself. In 2020, I gave some talks about the new features, wrote blog posts about them, and made videos about them.”

Future plans

Joel plans to create more content about Local Context, Plus Codes and other features in Google Maps Platform.

“I’m planning to start with a podcast about Maps and how to use it to create better applications,” he says. “I’ve been doing this in Spanish, so I need to create content in English, too.”

He has three professional goals: start to contribute to open source, create a little startup, and start projects that use Google Maps Platform.

Follow Joel on Twitter at @DezkaReid | Check out Joel’s projects on GitHub

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website or learn more about our GDE program.

Announcing the Google Maps Platform YouTube Channel!

Posted by Samirah Javed, Social Partnership Manager and Alex Muramoto, Developer Advocate

The time has come!

We’re excited to announce the official launch of the Google Maps Platform YouTube channel, a place for developers to learn and immerse themselves in the possibilities with maps.





We already have some great content on the channel about how to get started, incredible user stories, and the return of our Geocasts series coming soon - a series dedicated to providing walkthroughs and tips to help you learn how to implement Google Maps Platform features in your web and mobile apps.

Subscribe here → @GoogleMapsPlatformGoogle Maps Platform bannerSee you there!

Introducing Google Maps Platform

Posted by Google Maps Platform Team

It's been thirteen years since we opened up Google Maps to your creativity and passion. Since then, it's been exciting to see how you've transformed your industries and improved people's lives. You've changed the way we ride to work, discover the best schools for our children, and search for a new place to live. We can't wait to see what you do next. That's why today we're introducing a series of updates designed to make it easier for you to start taking advantage of new location-based features and products.

We're excited to announce Google Maps Platform—the next generation of our Google Maps business—encompassing streamlined API products and new industry solutions to help drive innovation.

In March, we announced our first industry solution for game studios to create real-world games using Google Maps data. Today, we also offer solutions tailored for ridesharing and asset tracking companies. Ridesharing companies can embed the Google Maps navigation experience directly into their apps to optimize the driver and customer experience. Our asset tracking offering helps businesses improve efficiencies by locating vehicles and assets in real-time, visualizing where assets have traveled, and routing vehicles with complex trips. We expect to bring new solutions to market in the future, in areas where we're positioned to offer insights and expertise.

Our core APIs work together to provide the building blocks you need to create location-based apps and experiences. One of our goals is to evolve our core APIs to make them simpler, easier to use and scalable as you grow. That's why we've introduced a number of updates to help you do so.

Streamlined products to create new location-based experiences

We're simplifying our 18 individual APIs into three core products—Maps, Routes and Places, to make it easier for you to find, explore and add new features to your apps and sites. And, these new updates will work with your existing code—no changes required.

One pricing plan, free support, and a single console

We've heard that you want simple, easy to understand pricing that gives you access to all our core APIs. That's one of the reasons we merged our Standard and Premium plans to form one pay-as-you go pricing plan for our core products. With this new plan, developers will receive the first $200 of monthly usage for free. We estimate that most of you will have monthly usage that will keep you within this free tier. With this new pricing plan you'll pay only for the services you use each month with no annual, up-front commitments, termination fees or usage limits. And we're rolling out free customer support for all. In addition, our products are now integrated with Google Cloud Platform Console to make it easier for you to track your usage, manage your projects, and discover new innovative Cloud products.

Scale easily as you grow

Beginning June 11, you'll need a valid API key and a Google Cloud Platform billing account to access our core products. Once you enable billing, you will gain access to your $200 of free monthly usage to use for our Maps, Routes, and Places products. As your business grows or usage spikes, our plan will scale with you. And, with Google Maps' global infrastructure, you can scale without thinking about capacity, reliability, or performance. We'll continue to partner with Google programs that bring our products to nonprofits, startups, crisis response, and news media organizations. We've put new processes in place to help us scale these programs to hundreds of thousands of organizations and more countries around the world.

We're excited about all the new location-based experiences you'll build, and we want to be there to support you along the way. If you're currently using our core APIs, please take a look at our Guide for Existing Users to further understand these changes and help you easily transition to the new plan. And if you're just getting started, you can start your first project here. We're here to help.