Tipped off by a reader to Philipp of Google Blog0scoped is a new Google Maps feature that we are all familiar with – Google Maps Lab. If you check out Google Maps right now, you can see the familiar New Labs Icon. Clicking that icon will bring up the Google Maps Lab currently containing 9 experimental features.
Like Gmail Lab, features in Google Maps are opt-in, that is you can select only the features which interest you. Simply enable and you can enjoy that feature on Google Maps. So far, I’ve tested the “Where in the World Game” a fun game where you need to guess the name of the marked country on the satellite imagery map.
The other experimental features in Google Maps Lab are:
Rotatable Maps -Tired of North always being up? Add rotatable map types and give East, West and South a fair go.
What’s Around Here? – Adds a second search button that searches for “*”, returning the top results in the current view. A great way to browse the map.
LatLng Tooltip – Displays a tooltip next to the mouse cursor showing the latlng directly underneath it.
LatLng Marker – Adds an option to the context menu that lets you drop a mini marker showing the latlng of the position that the cursor was pointing at when the context menu was evoked
Smart Zoom – Ever zoom in too far and get the message “We don’t have imagery at this zoom level”? Ensure you don’t see it again, with Smart Zoom, which will check in advance what imagery exists, and ensure you can’t zoom in beyond it.
