The Google Street View platform has been around for the past 15 years helping travellers to better visualize and prepare their trips. In Belgium, the Atomium remains the most visited place of the Google platform.
1. Atomium
Originally constructed for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (Expo ’58), the Atomium was designed by the engineer André Waterkeyn and the architects André and Jean Polak. The iconic symbol of the city of Brussels is located on the Heysel plateau in Laeken, where the Expo ’58 exhibition took place.
It is the most popular tourist attraction in Brussels, serving as a museum and an art centre. Its nine 18-metre-diameter stainless steel clad spheres are connected in the shape of a unit cell that could represent an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times.
After the Atomium, the Belgian ranking of 9 most popular destinations on Street View are the Brussels Grand-Place, the Royal Palace, the Brussels South Station, the Brussels North Station, Manneken Pis, Brussels Airport, Antwerp Central Station, Pairi Daiza and the Gravensteen in Ghent.
2. Google Street View
Google launched Street View in May 2007 and the first cities on the service were New York, San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas and Denver. In 2008, the first cities outside the United States followed, namely the Tour de France route. Meanwhile, people can view 220 billion images via Google Street View and the camera cars have already driven more than 16 million kilometres, the equivalent of 400 rounds around the earth.
In the past year, Indonesia, the United States and Japan were the three most searched countries on the platform. The three most visited monuments are the Burj Khalifa Tower, in the United Arab Emirates, the Eiffel Tower, in France and the Taj Mahal, in India.
Google announced plans to start using a new camera next year which will be easier to transport and will be easier to transport to hard-to-reach places, such as the Amazon rainforest.
