Google tries out ‘Indoor Street View’

You’re already used to using Google to know what a new location looks like before you even get there, and now you might be able to see what it actually looks like inside your final destination.

The apparent idea is to ask store and restaurant owners to allow Google to post 360-degree views of inside their locations, allowing users to click on specific buildings within Street View to get an up-close-and-personal look at what’s inside those buildings.

“We hope to enable businesses to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out through professional, high-quality imagery,” the BBC quoted a Google spokesperson as saying.

The project, for now, is targeting local businesses and mom-and-pop type places as opposed to the huge big box stores – since those all look the same anyway.

Google Street View has changed the way we react when we need to look up a new address for a job interview, house party, store location, or anything else. An indoor version of that could be just as revolutionary.

Google isn’t the only one working on bringing more information to users when they get off the roads. A few companies are pioneering “indoor GPS,” allowing users to easily navigate when they’re inside malls, find the next exhibit in a museum, or know just how much farther it is until they reach the end of a street tunnel.

Pretty soon, you won’t even need to leave your house in order to hit the town and go shopping.