2017 marks the 10th anniversary of Machu Picchu being chosen as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World! In 2015, a Google team came to the Inca citadel to do a special collection shooting and captured awesome visual material which ended up showing Machu Picchu in 360°!
Google has an app called Street View, which displays all kinds of locations in a 360° horizontal fashion and up to 290° on vertical; back in the day, Machu Picchu was chosen as part of a special collection to be captured and posted there; Cusco city had been previously digitalized in 2013, but Machu Picchu really took the Google app to a higher level.
How did Google capture Machu Picchu in 360°?
Here we go to realize how did Google carried out this task: there’s a sophisticated equipment called trekker, which is composed of a regular backpack which supports a sphere with 15 small cameras attached; as a Google crew member walks around carrying the backpack, visual information of the surroundings is captured by them, which later is upgraded into a series of 360° images, that you can explore with rotating movements of a mouse or a finger. The trekker can weigh up to 25 kg, and is one of the devices Google uses for the Street View app; they also use, for instance, a truck and even a supermarket cart to capture images around the world.
In Peru, Google used mainly local staff to go walking around the citadel and capture its most impressive sights for the special collection pictures to be posted on Street View; using the trekker, they finally obtained really wonderful shots of the Inca citadel.
The Virtual Tour
These Machu Picchu 360° images are included in a 26-picture gallery showing the citadel and other attractions in Cusco, on Google Arts & Culture section Wonders of Machu Picchu; really amazing images were captured! The most attractive and impressive places of the citadel are available there and of course you can explore them in a 360° fashion to obtain all-around views, just like people can do on facebook for instance. Wonderful Inca buildings at the citadel, deep valleys and rivers, amazing landscapes, wide, blue skies with pristine white clouds, the surrounding mountains, all the beauty that can even leave you breathless is there, where you can rotate 360° and also zoom in and out! It’s quite worthy of your time to check this special collection gallery of Machu Picchu on Google’s Street View, more delightful now that you know how did they do it. A wonderful virtual tour indeed, really next best thing to being at Machu Picchu itself.
This virtual tour on Google will give you a wonderful Cusco and Machu Picchu experience! Clearly admire the details of Machu Picchu’s finely fitted stonework, its wide landscapes and even 360° images of the Hiram Bingham train, which is the luxury transportation to the citadel. The gallery also shows the typical, nearby Aguas Calientes village. This virtual 360° experience is really a treat, a must! Priceless!
The real tour
But there’s something which is still better than Street View’s virtual technology: our body. How did it happen? Now once you have done the virtual tour of Machu Picchu, I don’t see how you will not be really eager to make the Inca citadel your next travel destination! And once there, with your body, result of million years of refinement and upgrading by nature, you will also be able to zoom in and out at the amazing citadel’s spots and rotate 360° as much as you want in every direction, but there’s more: you will also be able to touch, smell, hear and feel all the regular, non-electronic reality the place offers, and finally the peak experience of them all: the mighty, reviving energy flow of Andean nature at the place which was the luxury retreat for Inca royalty back in the day. How did they do it? Nobody knows for sure yet, but they did know what they were doing.
I hope you greatly enjoy your Machu Picchu virtual tour on Google Street View 360°, and when you feel ready for the real tour of the amazing citadel, do contact our professional staff here at TOUR IN PERU for booking your perfect vacation!
