Google Maps adds indoor museum maps, no tour guides yet

Tuesday, Google rolled out a small update for Google Maps for Android that adds detailed indoor maps of more than twenty different U.S. museums, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, 17 different Smithsonian museums, and even the National Zoo in Washington D.C.

Cedric Dupont, of the Google Maps for Mobile team on Tuesday said the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National World War II Museum in New Orleans will all be added to Google Maps in the near future.

Since launching its indoor mapping project last November, Google says it has added more than 10,000 indoor maps worldwide. This is bolstered by the crowdsourced Map Maker project which opened last year, and Google Maps Floor Plans which lets anyone add images of building floor plans and match them up to Google Maps' aerial imagery.

Then, by conducting "walks," map curators can use their phone to improve location accuracy by walking through parts of a building and collecting location information in an app.