Google Maps has been a pretty wildly successful bit of tech over the last 15 years, ensconsing itself as the top dog of the consumer navigation world by some distance.

Still, though, there's always room for improvement, and Google has just rolled out a pretty significant new level of detail to a few key cities around the world, as an indicator of how it wants to level up its service more widely. 

Those locations include Central London, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York, and effectively add a whole bunch more detail to its maps, more accurately reflecting real life obstacles and things like pedestrian crossings. 

The change is subtle but pretty significant - as you can see from our header image, places like Trafalgar Square are suddenly layered with more information about how you would actually go about crossing its complicated road system. 

The information being added also includes the size of sidewalks, traffic light locations and pedestrian islands, among others. It's fairly obvious why this is only rolling out to a few locations in the first instance, though, since it effectively involves remapping entire areas at a time. 

The changes are active now, without needing an updated app on mobile or anything - so why not check out some of your favourite hot spots to see how they've changed? It's the closest we're going to get to actually travelling to some of these places for a little while, after all.