Who hasn't lost an afternoon to Google Maps — scrolling around some new city, checking out all the attractions, dipping into Street View, and feeling like you're almost walking around yourself? While it's fun to explore like that, this is only possible because of the fantastic amount of place data Google's compiled, and made it available in such engaging format. At Google I/O 2022, the company's sharing its plans to take that to the next level, with a new 'immersive' view set to start coming to major cities around the world.

Beyond just giving you a beautiful Earth-style 3D look of cities, the immersive view can integrate traffic, weather conditions, and even let you dial back the clock to view historical data.

Curious about what's inside an attraction? Instead of relying on manually captured Street View indoor imagery, Google's able to generate some incredibly cool-looking virtual flybys from existing photos, for a slick preview of what to expect.

Immersive view will roll out city-by-city, and is so far confirmed only for big ones like Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The first of those will go live later this year.

Beyond this hot new viewing mode, Google also fills us in on a little progress in other areas, like racking up over 86 billion miles routed with its new eco-friendly tools, and work to expand Live View to third-party apps.