Google revealed that users can now "walk like an Egyptian" through new images on Street View that have been uploaded to Google Maps.
Users can visit Egypt as tourists without leaving the comfort of their own home, as Street View takes users to the most popular landmarks and destinations in Egypt.
The announcement was made through a blog post by Google's Head of Marketing for Missle East and North Africa, Tarek Abdalla.
Included in the sights of Egypt that users can see through Street View is the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is the only remaining member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
"Being able to bring a flavor of the pyramids online, so that people can experience the wonder and their grandeur, is something that we're really excited about doing," said Street View program manager Deanna Yick.
The Street View team of Google used their Trekker technology, which is a backpack that has a camera attached to the top, to collect images of several Egyptian sites over a period of a couple of weeks last year. The technology allows the team to take pictures of locations that the Street View car can't access, such as the bottom of the Grand Canyon or Angkor Wat.
The Street View team coordinated with the local government for the project, which collected images from the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Sphinx, the Hanging Church, the Pyramid of Djoser, Abu Mena, the Cairo Citadel and the Citadel of Qaitbay.
After collecting the images, the team assembled them into 360-degree, panoramic images that Street View users can explore just as if they are there.
"We have two kinds of collections," said Amita Khattri, another program manager for Street View. "We do countries that we have already collected imagery for - we sometimes go ahead and refresh the imagery - and then there are newer countries where we outreach and start on the new image collection."
Other locations that the team have created Street View panoramas for include the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the base camp at Mt. Everest, and the Galapagos Islands.
The mission of Street View is to serve as a digital mirror for users to look into other parts of the world, allowing people to virtually go to locations that they might not be able to visit personally. However, for ancient sites such as the Pyramids, the Street View images also record their condition, which could be useful for archaeologists several years from now as a reference to see how much the locations have changed.
