Germany: Miniatur Wunderland Digitized in Google Street View

As of now, Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland, which was awarded the title “world’s largest model railway” by Guiness World Records last year (cf. EAP News from September 15, 2015), can be explored from home. The website g.co/MiniaturWunderland offers Google Maps users the possibility to look at pictures of the miniature versions of the Swiss Alps or the Grand Canyon with “Street View”.

In order to be able to take photos of all the tourist attraction's corners and angles, Miniatur Wunderland in cooperation with Google and Ubilabs, a company specialized in interactive map application, developed tiny cameras. These cameras were mounted to a model bus and a model train, which could drive on the facility’s miniature streets and railway tracks. In this way, unique pictures showing areas such as Central Germany, Bavaria, Austria or America from a completely new perspective were taken. Furthermore, the Street View collection offers 360-degree views of places that are difficult to discover or cannot be seen at all at the "real" Miniatur Wunderland. "[...] Usually, our visitors either see the front or the back side of our facility. However, the new pictures for the first time offer users inside views into Miniatur Wunderland that not even on-site visitors get," Gerrit Braun, co-founder of Miniatur Wunderland, explains. (eap)