The European Championships, which start next week, are being co-hosted this year by Poland and Ukraine. Ukraine will host the final in the Olympic National Sports Complex in Kiev, and Poland will host the opening match in its brand-new National Stadium in Warsaw. Google announced today that soccer fans around the world can tour these venues, in addition to the other six tournament stadiums around Poland and Ukraine, using Google Street view.
The announcement came on the Google Lat Long Blog, the blog for the Google Maps and Google Earth teams. There, the virtual tours were displayed and the methods for how the huge stadiums were captured on film were described. From the blog post:
For those fans unable to attend but keen to sample what lies in store for the players and fans, we’ve captured the magic of the 8 stadiums with our Street View cars and trikes, to offer 360° street-level images of the grounds.
Google has only recently added Poland to the list of countries with street view enabled. The stadium views are only one of the many street views of historical or ecologically important sites Google has shown through its Street View Gallery. Other special street views include The White House, The Amazon River, and the Swiss Alps. Take a look at Ukraine’s Olympic Stadium below, which dates all the way back to 1923, when it was called the Red Stadium of Trotsky.