A few months ago, Google added all of the streets in Playa del Carmen to their maps section, finally delivering a clear and accurate map of Playa del Carmen. A few weeks ago, they enhanced this by adding Street View; a street level, panoramic perspective of almost all of Playa del Carmen. We have started to implement this technology into our local restaurant and bar guides.

Google Street View has been around for a couple of years and provides a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic view from a row of positions along the street. The images are captured via a Pontiac G5 equipped with nine directional cameras, GPS and loads of other electronics. These cars cruise through the city and capture the images that are utilized for the Street View. The images are placed on Google Maps, where you can access them by zooming all the way into a specific area, or typing an address into the search area. Google Maps has recently been added for mobile devices and can be viewed with iPhones and Blackberries.

Now, how did Google fare when mapping Playa del Carmen? Well, the biggest issue is that they only drove the car and didn’t utilize the tricycle that they sometimes use to map pedestrian areas.  Of course, for Playa del Carmen that means that a large portion of 5th Avenue (Juarez to Calle 32), Paseo del Carmen and the beach itself didn’t get Street View.  Let’s hope they return for a second tour of Playa and grab La Quinta! The rest of the town looks great and the images appear to be from a couple of months back. Even all of el Colosio, Nicte Ha and el Ejido were captured.

As mentioned, if you check out our restaurant guide and bar and nightlife guide , we have added Street View to roughly a quarter of our current listings and over the next week or two, the remaining markers should be placed, as well as both of the guides getting updated with the latest information.  Additionally the hotel section will get geo-coded during this time.

There will be other components to enhance this technology added to the site in January as well. The markers that have been placed get you in front of the location, though sometimes the rotation can be a bit off, so you may have to do a virtual spin on street to view some of the businesses.

So, check out the updated restaurant and nightlife sections to see your favorite locale. Here are a couple of examples to get you going:

Da Gigi
Babes 1
Om

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