Overview
- The rollout, which began Tuesday at Google I/O, reaches some Google AI Ultra subscribers in the United States with wider access planned in the coming weeks for global Ultra users.
- Users can pick a U.S. spot from Google Maps, choose a visual style, and generate an interactive scene that they can navigate and even populate with characters.
- DeepMind frames the feature as experimental, with output that looks more like a video game than real life and models that do not yet handle cause and effect or basic physics consistently.
- Google positions the update for creative play and for training AI agents and robots, and the company says Genie already helps one of Waymo’s simulators practice rare on-road events.
- Google cites roughly 20 years of Street View capture with more than 280 billion images across about 110 countries, which helps the model keep 360-degree spatial continuity as it builds generative edits on top of real places.