Google Maps Easter Egg Lets You Explore The TARDIS

Gasp! I would’ve had this post written 20 minutes ago, but I was too busy geeking the hell out.

Tucked away in a single streetview image of what appears to be a mere police box, a newly discovered Google Maps easter egg lets you go inside the TARDIS.

(If you don’t know what the TARDIS is, come on.)

How to do it:

  • Click this link
  • Move your mouse around a bit. The standard Google Maps directional arrows should pop up, with one little addition: a pair of double arrows. Click those. (Note: If you’re enrolled in the new Google Maps UI beta, the arrows might not appear. Instead, hit the up arrow on your keyboard. Thanks for the heads up on this trick, Eric! If it’s still not working for you, see the note at the bottom of this post.)
  • Bam! You should now be in the TARDIS’ bigger-on-the-inside (smaller-on-the-outside) interior.

I figured it’d just be a single, static shot, but no: you can click all around the control room, complete with StreetView’s signature panoramas, navigating all the way down below the main platform for a glimpse at the heart of the TARDIS itself. You don’t seem to be able to click into any of the hallways — that’s probably for the better, really, as we don’t want any of you getting lost.

Can’t find your way in? Look for these arrows:

arrows

Man, I wish I had something like this back when I was building my AR TARDIS. While I based the innards of mine on the last generation control room, figuring out how everything fit together in the interior from one-off set shots and screengrabs alone was… a bit of a pain.

(Note: Word is that this easter egg doesn’t always work in the new Google Maps interface, which many of you have likely opted into by now. No problem — just open the link in Chrome’s incognito mode [or whatever your browser’s private browsing mode might be called] and you should be back at the old Google Maps interface without requiring you to tweak any settings or log out of Google.)

[Nice find, Jalopnik!]