One of the big changes in Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them from the Harry Potter series is that it crosses the Atlantic, and goes back several decades, to have wizards fighting monsters loose in 1926 New York City. A lot of money has been put into getting the time period right, and Google has decided to help the movie show it off by injecting some Google Street View into the proceedings.
Google has a whole suite of Harry Potter stuff that debuted yesterday to promote the movie. Certain Google phones will now react to spells like “lumos” and “nox,” which turn the flashlight off and on, and if you buy a Daydream VR headset when it arrives later in November, you can mess around in Newt Scamander’s hotel room and maybe cast spells. But that’s only accessible to a handful of people. What everybody can go do, right now, is check out some of the movie’s sets on Google Street View.
They’re short on spoilers, alas, although you can zoom in with some more detail and look at MACUSA, the Blind Pig bar where the cast hangs out, and the apartment of Tina and Queenie Goldstein. One of the things we learn is that apparently Americans love terror alerts: Rowling tossed a big one right in the middle of MACUSA’s lobby. Well, at least it has a green?
That said, they’re missing the obvious, here. If there’s fantastic beasts out there, why not use Google Maps to find them? They’ve already done it with Pokemon!
(via Google)
