As you may have heard by now, Google is sending balloons up into the air in an effort to make fast Internet available to everyone in the world. The plan is to have balloons up twice the altitude of where commercial planes fly, all around the Earth. This is the latest “moonshot” project out of Google[x], the experimental branch of the company responsible for such noteworthy projects as Google Glass and self-driving cars.
Google has already launched balloons in New Zealand as part of its initial pilot test, which includes 50 users. Here, you can see some video from the launch.
Google has also made available a series of photos from the launch on the outskirts of Christchurch. Project Loon shared them on Google+, and they’re quite beautifully shot.
Google plans to expand the pilot across other areas that share the same latitude with New Zealand. It seems like the project is going pretty well so far, so we’ll see how far Google can really take this.
More on Project Loon and the technology behind it here.