Jaunted

Augmented Reality / Google / Google Goggles / → All Tags

This is the Future: Google's Terminator-View Augmented Reality Sunglasses

Augmented reality is neat and everything, allowing you to hold up a digital screen and see a virtual layer on top of boring old regular reality. In the travel world, you can point your cell phone at the sky and see what flights are passing overhead. You can point it at a tourist attraction and get Lonely Planet readouts. Or you can stand in the middle of a town square and rotate your phone, and eBay deals will pop up as the camera moves across buildings and stores.

But having to hold up a screen can be just so inconvenient. It looks awkward, it feel awkward, and it's hard to text friends and check email while you're also using augmented reality apps. Enter the engineers at Google, who are promising—maybe even by the end of this year—to sell sunglasses with virtual reality displays on the inside of the lenses.

When you look around you will see all kinds of information projected in front of your eyes. That's so insanely cool we're having trouble thinking of a sarcastic jaded way to transition you to the rest of this post.

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Google Maps / Art Travel / Travel Photography / Social Media / Google / → All Tags

Wonderful, Weird and NSFW Google Maps

There are a lot of people doing a lot of direct technological innovation with Google Maps. As a matter of strict "what are they adding to the service," Google engineers have recently loaded on maps of airports and even maps of malls and maps of the London Underground.

People who don't work for Google are also innovating with the application, including adding it as a built-in feature in new travel apps apps.

Then there's this other group of people—for the sake of convenience, let's call them hipsters—who are finding uses for Google Maps that are a little more artsy. 9-Eyes.com is a collection of weird, wonderful, strange, and occasionally NSFW images. The site is a project of Montreal artist Jon Rafman (Flickr; Twitter; Facebook; see the kind of comprehensive coverage you get here at Jaunted?). There are other projects linked from his main page, including this one titled "Kool-Aid Man in Second Life." It's exactly what it sounds like.

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Social Media / Travel Photography / Instagram / Google / → All Tags

Jaunted is Now on Instagram and Google+. So Yeah, Get on That.

One question: do you have an iPhone?

If YES: Sweet. You can easily see the original photos we're adding to Instagram by simply following us on the free app (our name: Jaunted). Instagram is social photo sharing, but we're playing it nice by only posting some of our own best aviation and travel shots. These are photos you won't see here on the site; they're kind of special-edition images in that way, if you think about it. Anyway, here's one to show you what we mean. Nice, huh?

If NO: That's okay. While the world waits for Instagram to launch on Android, you can totally still catch some of our shots and other (non-boring) updates on our new Google+ account right here. Add us to your circles! We promise to be cool about it.

[Photo: Jaunted]

Private Jets / Google Earth / Google Maps / Google / Weird Travel / → All Tags

Google Wants to Rebuild the World's Largest Airship Hangar. There's Only One Catch.

We never have enough time or space to get to all the Google Travel news that we'd like. A few weeks ago we talked about their new airport maps, and a little before that we did an introduction to their burgeoning flight search service. Unfortunately Google Flight Search got dragged down by how the airline industry does business, and it has remained unimpressive.

On the other side of the success spectrum, though, developers and programmers expanded Google Earth to include games—a move that involved airlines and has implications for social media—and an MIT student playing around with Google Maps made a de facto travel itinerary checker.

But this post isn't about any of those stories. This post is about deep, abiding, biting, bitter jealousy.

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Google Maps / Google / Technology / Travel Tech / Airport News / Airports / → All Tags

Google Maps Ventures into the Final Frontier: Airports

Having more or less mapped the world's roadways—up to and including getting the security hyper-conscious Israelis to let their guards down—the Google Maps kids have taken to sending their cars and tricycles to increasingly esoteric destinations.

They've mapped bike routes and jungle trails, which are natural extensions of roadway mapping, but they've also extended their maps into our beloved San Diego Zoo and the insides of Japanese businesses—neither of which are particularly intuitive additions.

One area into which Google had yet to expand was the inside of airports. The oversight was particularly notable because, in sharp contrast, Microsoft's Bing search engine had added airport maps a few months ago. Bing's maps launched with support for 42 national airports, and included locations for restaurants, ATMs, ticket counters, restrooms, and so on. The implementation was not only pretty slick, but it was something that Google Maps just didn't have. So guess what Google just announced as the newest feature for Google Maps.

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Google / Orbitz / Kayak / Hipmunk / Technology / Travel Websites / Travel News / Travel Industry / Airline Industry / → All Tags

Google Unveils Flight Search, Provides Helpful Instructional Video

Last May we told you that Google was getting into the travel business, with the Mountain View search giant having just acquired travel software company ITA. ITA provides the algorithms that power sites like Orbitz, Kayak, and CheapTickets - to say nothing of handling schedules for a bunch of airlines - and that's pretty much all it does. So Google's intentions weren't exactly inscrutable, even if the exact details of what they wanted with ITA weren't totally clear.

Then a few months later flight schedules started showing up in Google results. That wasn't particularly exciting in and of itself, but it banished any remaining doubts about whether Google was getting into the flight search game. And so no one was really surprised when, earlier this week, Google finally launched their new Google Flight Search. It's exactly what you think it is, and you can check it out here.

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Google Maps / Google / Street View / Technology / Nature Travel / Green Travel / Brazil Travel / Travel News / → All Tags

Google's Newest Street View Project Isn't About Streets At All

Often the news stories about Google Maps Street View—the Mountain View technology that allows you to virtually walk up and down roads, alleyways, and even zoos—have controversial political upshots. There are perennial privacy issues, including ones that have brought Google into conflicts with European governments. In an age of terrorism there are also genuine security risks, and it took until this week for Israel to greenlight Street View despite the Israelis' numerous safety concerns (although we did kind of tell you they'd end up deciding that way). In any case, mapping the world has turned out to be a more problematic goal than Google might have imagined.

The newest Street View project shouldn't turn out that way. Instead, Google seems to have found a project that just about anyone can get behind.

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Virgin America / Travel Tech / In-Flight Entertainment / In-Flight WiFi / Google / Airline News / → All Tags

No Laptop? No Problem! Grab a Google Chromebook on Virgin America Flights

Virgin America wants to help us get to the Chrome zone, and we can hardly wait to help them out. If you haven't heard of Google's new Chromebook computer what it is is basically a laptop tricked out exclusively with all of Google's latest technology. The kicker is that things are all stored in that little thing known as "the cloud," so your stuff is with you no matter where you are. That's a good thing, especially with in-flight WiFi on all Virgin America flights.

Starting today and running through the end of September you'll be able to test drive a Chromebook on select flights from San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, and Chicago. There will be kiosks near the departure gate, and all you have to do is grab one and take it for a spin up in the air and enjoy some free in-flight Wifi, but please remember to return your loaner laptop when you're back on the ground. It's also probably a good idea not to spill any of your in-flight beverages or snacks in the keyboard.

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Google / Airlines / Technology / Travel Tech / → All Tags

Google Adds Flight Schedules to Search Results

Not too long ago, Google wrote an oversized check to acquire ITA and all of their airline software and scheduling goodness, so it’s not too surprising that the big G is pretty curious about working more airline info into their site. They haven’t started to utilize their new software toys just yet, but they are improving search results for those looking to head out of town.

Anytime you do a Google search between a couple city pairs in hopes of finding the best deal on airfare, there’s now the option to check out the whole schedule between the two locations. Just enter a couple of airport codes—or city names—and you can see every major legacy carrier and low cost option flying between the two places, and at what times.

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Google Maps / Google / Google Earth / Japan Travel / Technology / Maps / Tokyo Restaurants / → All Tags

Google Now Mapping the Inside of Japanese Businesses, Everything Else

Google continues to make progress on their project of enabling you to see the world without ever leaving your house (sadly, not totally a joke). The company is adding more and more information to Google Maps, this time encouraging Japanese businesses to upload panoramic images of their stores to Google's Business Photos database, which is hooked into Google Places, which of course is embedded in Google Maps. The Japanese focus is part of a broader roll out, with Business Photos accepting images from US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The upshot is that, metaphorically but not really, you'll soon be able to navigate your way "inside" restaurants and shops digitally on Google Maps. Just like with other photos in the application, users will be able to pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D panoramic images of business. CNN's hyperlocal Asia travel site CNNGo, showing an admirable awareness of cultural sensibilities, mused that the feature will especially appeal to their "more shy" Japanese readers. We imagine that users elsewhere will find plenty of other uses, above and beyond the wow factor.

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Google Maps / Tourism / Bar Refaeli / Israel Travel / Religious Travel / Google / Tourism Boards / → All Tags

Israel is About to Get Google Mapped So Hard

Israel is finally set to allow Google to map out the country's roads using Google Maps Street View, which is something of a bold move since terrorists routinely brag about using Google Earth to target their missiles and rockets at Israelis. Since we're talking about the Middle East, the decision has naturally engendered a robust debate about costs and benefits. On the costs side: the terrorism and people dying thing. Supposedly on the benefits side: tourism.

We're not really going to belabor the security issue, partly because it's convoluted but mostly because it's way, way too depressing for a Monday morning. You can go here for a will-it or won't-it backgrounder. The tourism debate, on the other hand, seems a little bit more straightforward and a little closer to our wheelhouse.

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Street Art / Street Art Travel / Art Travel / Graffiti / Websites / Google / → All Tags

Google Goes Street with Website that Showcases Graffiti

We told you how Google's Art Project brings you inside some of the world's top museums virtually through its Google Earth-like street-view technology. Take that same idea and apply it to graffiti and murals and you have Street Art View.

The site, created by Red Bull and Brazilian ad agency Loducca, shows sick street art from all over the world. Although the resolution of the shots isn't as good as Art Project, you can be the curator of this display and upload any eye-catching graffiti you see.

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