Busch Gardens Tampa Bay and its waterpark, Adventure Island, are now featured in Street View on Google Maps.
Virtual visits are now available to all 10 SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment locations, including the SeaWorld parks in Orlando, San Antonio and San Diego; Discovery Cove, a swim-with-dolphins resort, and Aquatica, SeaWorld’s waterpark, both in Orlando; Busch Gardens and Water Country USA, both in Williamsburg; and Sesame Place in Langhorne, Penn.
In Tampa, nearly every inch of Busch Gardens was mapped using one of Google’s “Trikes.” A state-of-the-art camera automatically gathered photographs from the back of a modified bicycle. Google software then blended the images, creating the interactive and moveable 360-degree scenes Street View is known for.
“I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many great places around the world aren’t accessible by car, but still would be perfect to include in Street View on Google Maps. The immensely popular SeaWorld parks are perfect examples of fun and interesting locations that our Trike can add to Google Maps, benefiting families and tourists around the world,” said Dan Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team & creator of the Trike.
All of the Central Florida theme parks except Disney’s are available on Google Street View (Busch Gardens, SeaWorld and Universal). Viewers can start by going to maps.google.com and searching for the park name. Then drag the orange “Pegman” icon (found at the top left of the map) for a “walking tour.”
did you know it takes you backstage? at one point it took me through a wall and there was a backstage area with some workers there.