Feel like a hike in Japan? You can ‘climb’ Mount Fuji with Google Street View

They trekked through the Grand Canyon and the deserted island of Hashima. They went to the top of the tallest building in the world and the middle of the ocean. Now it appears they’ve taken to climbing mountains.

Yep, Google’s Street View team is at it again. Its latest mission was to take one of its custom-built Trekker backpacks up the side of Mount Fuji in Japan and record the experience in interactive panoramas. So they climbed all 3 776 metres and came back with this:

While the majority of Street View footage is captured with cars and smaller trolleys (which can be manoeuvred through smaller spaces), Google’s adopted the Trekker units for hard-to-reach areas. They consist of a Android-operated 40 pound (18 kilogram) backpack which houses the 15-lens camera system and takes photos every 2.5 seconds as the Googler walks along.

As Setsuo Murai, Head of Geo Partnerships for Google Japan explains, this technology allowed the Google team to capture over 14 000 panoramas of the mountain’s Yoshida trail, the crater at the top as well as the zigzagging decent path. On the way, they wandered past some confused looking tourists and um, a post office.

The release of the Street View imagery comes a month after UNESCO awarded the dormant volcano World Heritage Site status for its contribution to Japanese culture and history. Murai hopes that the panoramas will give the influx of climbers the mountain is set to receive this summer a “sense of the terrain to expect under their feet — especially all the night-time climbers who shuffle up in the dark to see the sunrise at the crack of dawn.”