Google has recently updated the 3D imagery for some of the key Olympic venues. Sometime in June Google had significantly increased the 3D coverage for Rio de Janeiro but that imagery was captured around February 2013 in preparation for the FIFA World Cup that took place in Brazil in 2014. There is also fresh aerial imagery that we believe was captured at the same time as the 3D imagery. This would put the date of the 3D imagery of the white water and BMX venues as late as July 2nd, 2016. So Google really rushed it, getting the imagery processed in under a month. The aerial imagery of some of the other venues is a bit older (early June). The aerial imagery is available only in the default layer. It has not, as of this writing, been pushed to ‘historical imagery’.
The white water venue looks ready for action.
Google clearly put in some extra modelling effort on some of the buildings:
Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre.
We wanted to post a link to a map of Olympic venues that we found on the Google Maps Gallery a few weeks ago, but when we checked today it appears the Google Maps Gallery has been discontinued and replaced by My Maps. It appears to still be possible to see maps that were formerly in the Maps Gallery, but there is no search function that we could find! So instead, use this KML file
for the main Olympic venues that we previously created for this post
“Top Maps” and “Staff Picks” are familiar headings from the Google Maps Gallery. But where is the search box?
The Google Maps Gallery had lost a lot of its best maps last year when it dropped maps from Google Maps Engine, which was deprecated and later shut down.
