Starting with Maps, Google is starting to roll out Live View, which it previously announced, in a handful of cities. Live View uses your phone’s camera in combination with Google’s AI chops to provide you with a turn-by-turn navigation overlay when you hold your phone up while the feature is active. Maps will now also help you find a compatible charger for your electric vehicle, handy for long road trips to visit family in places that may have changed since your last visit. Maps is also expanding its accessible places feature to show wheelchair-accessible businesses globally, where it was previously only available in select countries.
If you can’t make it to the stores, or you simply want to avoid the inevitable crowding, Google also added some handy augmented-reality features to Search to help shoppers visualize how their purchases look in real life. Google already offers AR-enabled features that allow you to virtually “try on” beauty products using your phone’s camera. Similarly to how Real Tone helps capture a variety of skin tones, Google is using similar principles power an AR feature in Search to help beauty shoppers take the guesswork out of matching a foundation to their skin tone, allowing users to see what the selected foundation will look like on a model with a similar skin tone.