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Google Adds Satellite Imagery to Maps
Ant writes "BetaNews reports that Google quietly updated its maps service late Monday to include satellite imagery, a first in the industry... Much of Google Maps remains the same - just with detailed pictures from high-tech satellites instead of standard map graphics. Maps can be dragged to view adjacent areas, which means users do not have click and wait for graphics to reload. Zooming is also instantaneous with the help of a slider placed atop the map." The resolution doesn't seem very high, but the integration is very seamless.
This isn't an industry first, unless perhaps it's real-time.
I can imagine taking some very high resolution artwork and displaying it using this technology. I can zoom in to the max resolution or your can scroll around forever.
Anybody have any software that would take a large image file and apply a google-map-like interface to it? The software should be something as simple as:
If you are smart about your image naming conventions you shouldn't even need a powerful webserver. The whole thing could be served up via static files from a webserver with enough disk space and a big enough pipe.
I'd like to see this for things like:
--
On-line Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator
I can't seem to find an example on the maps site. Maybe if the article were available I could see one
Looks like, at least in parts, the imagery is from an older dataset than what's on the Keyhole service. I live in a large neighborhood that's been under construction for 3 years across the various sections, and there are more houses in the Keyhole dataset than on the Google Maps satellite images.
No idea how much older, but it can't be more than a year or so.
... thats the standard for commercial imagery and, with CitiPix flyovers (non-space) it's down around 1/3 of that.
Frankly most of what's available is only good for mapping, and that isn't that good at best. Most of the images have been jpg'd to the point that an 8x8 block is destroying what little detail is available.
For example, 8x8 blocked JPG at 10 meters per pixel is a boatload of image data lost.
And yes, I work with Satellite imagery.
I do not see any change!!!!!!!!!!!. Its just the old google maps :-s
The europe is covered only at low resolution. I hoped to see my house, with no luck. However, it's still a beta release. Great job, although quite scaring.
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
I've been playing with this this morning, and all i can say is wow. There is some cool code and tech behind that, to be sure.
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Eh, no. Multimap had aerial imagery at least three years ago and they still do. Not satellite, but as far as the end-user is concerned, the effect is identical.
Very cool. And the world is more then just the USA in satellite view. Searching for anything outside the states does not work yet. But hey, it's a beta. Can't wait for more coverage.
Do you mean that Google is the first in the industry to have satellite images on a map-site? :)
Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten have had this on their map-service for almost a year now. At any time in the map-search you can switch between a vector-based map and the satellite images. Very neat
maybe they actually were taking aeriel satellite photos last Friday. Has google pulled another GMail-like fast one on us all?
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Here in the UK the online provider MultiMap lets you do the same thing, just with aerial photography rather than sattelite imagery (it obivously takes a lot less time to photo the UK with a plane than the US, so planes are more feasible).
How is this really "new" - in fact, MultiMap has an even cooler feature, which uses a Java applet to overlay the photos with the map, so the area your mouse is over gets a photo superimposed over it.
The only advantage Google has that I can see is a higher free resolution - if you want high res photos on Multimap, you have to pay.
I see that the US is the only place on Earth...
If you try looking east from NY or west from LA you just get endless blue ocean. Hello... Hello... This is the rest of the world calling!
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As was pointed out in the comments of the previous Slashdot article about Google Maps, the map service map.search.ch for Switzerland already has these features, including the satellite views!
/MC
multimap.co.uk has had this feature for quite a while as well.
Looking at the map, I went to see if my neighborhood was there. There are not even streets on the images. Just a big brown field. The streets were put in about 4 years ago!
... Microsoft's terraserver has been doing this for many years. I'm guessing 5 or 6 years but I could be off by a couple.
Wow, even though I'm not american, the seamless scrolling makes the application superb way to waste time - zoom into a city, and just start scrolling along a road, and you never know where you are going to get!
Rather nice if you want to plan a trip, too, as you get an idea how things look like along the way! And if the resolution gets better in distant future, who will need to do the actual trip anyway?
If a service like this really becomes popular, it has vast potential - just zoom to where you are, and you can see all web sites in the area, plus visual hints on how to get there and how does the thing look like. Now if you only could link images taken from those places directly to maps..
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This isn't a first in the industry, Microsoft did this over 5 years ago, with their Terraserver project. http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ It might have not had the same goals as Google Maps, but it definitly is the same concept.
Good ol slashdot effect :-)
You made the wrong selection in the year dropdown. That brown field is how your neighborhood will look in 2007.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It is somewhat disconcerting to be scrolling around the area where I grew up, and see one half of a lake in full summer splendor, with boats frolicing and surrounded by green hills...and the other half of the lake is frozen solid.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
You are AMAZING. I want your children.
Really, I found it! This is awesome, I can't wait to waste more time with this!
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"First in the industry"?. Multimap has been doing it for a yonk and a half. They get their data from getmapping.com; and you can even buy framed prints of your house from above.
Anybody else notice the watermarks over the imagery that reads "(C) 2005 Google". It's especially visible over light areas such as beaches. Of course it's their right, just interesting. And there is a fixed copyright in the lower right that reads "Imagery (c) 2005 DigitalGlobe, EarthSat", at least in some California areas.
Anyway, this is really nice. To be able to switch between traditional line-art mode and imagery. It's neat to do something like a text search on a hospital and then switch to image mode and see the + marking the hellicopter landing pad right under the marker flag.
It would be nice if they include the subway and bus routs to the directions portion similar to HopStop.com
Just out of curiosity, I put in the address of my university, just to see what it looked like from above. Interestingly, the photos seem between 3-5 years out of date. I know it's a free service (I'm certainly not complaining), but is the information going to be updated or has the US government cracked down on that sort of thing?
Or will Google next year on the birthday of the service unveil real time satellite imagery?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.051735,-116.0338 21&spn=0.125484,0.170631&t=k&hl=en
I thought most of the satellite image services now put a giant white block over certain places in the US. Maybe google will add that later. Not that anyone in the world DOESN'T know what the white house and pentagon look like, but here you go anyway...
v enue,washington,+dc&t=k
, Arlington,+VA&t=k
White house:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1600+Pennsylvania+A
Pentagon:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=2+South+Rotary+Road
I can see my house from here! Oh wait - I can see everyone's house from here.
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Mapquest USED to have a switch for photos, it went away some months ago.
http://mapper.acme.com/ has zip code and lat long resolved to topos and aerial photos.
Note that a lot of these are actually aerial photo surveys, not satellite images.
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It's very cool to see the driving directions route on the satellite images as well.
Which reminds me, has anyone managed to print a google maps route map without loosing the route line on the map?
Better flight searching coming soon.
How can this be first in the industry. Terraserver has been doing it for atleast 6 years and NASA's World Wind does a fantastic job.
Time to invest in tinfoil hat shares.
Especially for GPS use.
Great googly-moogly. Stop with cheap low-res sat photos and try adding a scale to your maps. You know, one of the basic features of a map? The little hashed bar that gives me some idea how far it is from one point on the map to another. I realize it is not innovative or amazingly cool, but it kinda renders your maps useless otherwise.
As has been said (and widely ignored by mods) above, if you're in the Uk then it's been possible using multimap.com for quite some time now. I'm not sure of their coverage of the rest of europe/world, but this is not new.
Mapquest had arial photos for a long time that zoomed in farther than what google offers. I haven't seen them on their site in a while however.
I typed in "map of australia" and got an advert for a tattoo emporium and a location pin stuck into a map of the USA :(
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I shouldnt be surprised by this, but the images are stitched from different sat. passes. My home town of Dallas is compiled from at least two perspectives. Quite disorienting when two skyscrapers lean across each other. and shawdows point at different angles.
Using this, I see that my lawn is the worst looking in the whole neighborhood. If only I could use the satellite's laser weapons to destroy my neighbors' lawns, then I would rule the area! Bwahahaha!
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Somewhere online I saw a demo of printed maps that had three layers to them. Depending the angle you viewed the page at you saw the different layers to different degrees.
What I would love to see is a slider where you could have an overlay of the street map on top of the sat pics thereby giving the real world images a little more structure. It might need to only include the larger streets or some such but I certainly hope google is working on merging the to better then a simple toggle.
Either way, yay!
(am I suppose to make a comment about how google is either trying to take over the world or is the best company ever? I can never remember which it is...)
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
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http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.962159395217896, -93.5434341430664&spn=0.008153915405273438,0.01179 0990829467773&t=k&hl=en
All is Number -Pythagoras.
No Canadian addresses and the map lacks the REST OF THE WORLD...
Lame...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Great job guys, that posting just took out Betanews.com. Dunno when these news sites'll learn and stop carrying articles on Google... Or maybe they should just block Google articles from Slashdotters - since we get to know everything that happens anyway...
Is there a "donate" button anywhere? I feel I should be paying them for all their services. Apparently they are doing alright without donations.
Anyone else notice white blobs on their images? My white blob has the distinct shadow of a water tower coming from it. Which makes sense since there is indeed a water tower there (or was, and hey, I've never actually seen the top of it, perhaps it IS painted white with a Google logo on it). Won't it be easier for folks with evil intent to just scan for white blobs now? I know it caught my eye. Sad.
I wonder why the US Capitol building and related office buildings in D.C are blurred out? Other things like the White House and the Pentagon aren't.
I saw that too, and figured that Frank Gehry had some major new projects I had not heard about yet.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Really cool map-photo merging of Lake Windermere
So where's the famous Area 51? :-)
wtf? that's me right there!
I think we actually slashdot'ed google. The site's not responding.
Its interesting that the U.S. Capitol is blurred out, but somehow the White House isn't.
------
zap.....
Wow, how fast are they! They announced LAST WEEK that they acquired Keyhole, and now already the tech is implemented into their map system? Impressive!
Oy. Can anyone else get this to work or is it a hoax??
Mapquest gave the option of toggling between satellite imagery and maps several years ago. They seem to have dropped it recently, but Google is definitely not the first. I know this because a friend of mine got lost in downtown San Diego back in 2001 and I was able to give her directions based on building descriptions thanks to MapQuest satellite imagery.
Isn't this a dupe of an April Fool's joke? And I could've been on the satellite photos if I had only believed...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
The satellite imagery is nice and all, but it's not very high quality, nor is it anywhere close to the first in the industry - Mapquest had it for years.
But really, with all the gee whiz about this stuff, Google has totally missed two very important things:
1. A scale! There's no scale on the maps at all! How hard is this to implement, fercrissakes?!
2. Printable routes. The neat purple line overlay showing your driving route is not printed by most browsers (IE/Firefox). Very annoying.
These are really, really easy things for them to implement. I'm stunned that they overlooked it.
Ever see those COPS and courtroom shows? They always blur the guilty parties.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The buildings look up-side down...
Where is the rotate button like in SimCity?
Tres cool. So what are those patches of sand in Central Park anyway?
Really nice, but look at Keyhole, another google product, wich is similar to google maps satellite but better and not free
I was just looking a new housing development which was approved in late 2003 and just started the next phase. The images on this development show the new construction so at most the image was a year old and from the best I can see it appears to within 6 months. So while some images might be years old I think some are very up to date.
It would be very interesting to know how often images will be updated though.
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You insensitive clod!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=paine+field&ll=47.92 5035,-122.272961&sll=47.979167,-122.200833&spn=0.0 05311,0.007253&sspn=0.120850,0.213885&t=k&hl=en :-)
Hint: It is the largest building in the world.
First in the industry?
As recently as 2 years ago, Mapquest had satellite images for most of the US. I could type in the addresses of all my friends from college and my parents' and get pictures of their homes. The resolution wasn't great, and different zoom features may have been from different satellite passes, but it was a very entertaining and educational service. (The highest resolution pass of my home showed nothing but cleared dirt but the third highest showed completed structures.)
Once I was trying to give someone directions to the Cheesecake Factory in Austin's Arboretum, the map services were not very informative, and the restaraunt is actually kind of hidden from most of the parking lot. The map services could get a car to the complex, but it's a decent sized place to direct a coworker. So I got the satellite image, printed it on the color laser printer and pointed out the building we'd meet at. Worked great.
It was, of course, licensed from a third party and I have no doubt the licence didn't pay for itself in Mapquests's grand plans.
On the other hand, Mapquest's satellite photos weren't very good at plotting some of the area around Saratoga Springs, NY, and northern Vermont was missing. Google's new service seems to have those fixed, from a quick look around.
The images from my neighborhood are at least 2 years old. Otherwise, this is pretty cool. Sure the resolution isn't that great, but it's free. Hopefully the resolution will improve at a later date.
If W tells me that the US is the only real place in the world, then the US is the only place in the world! Don't try and change my narrow world view! (Oh, and Canada is on there too)
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
A little north of that lake. Aliens have invaded. http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=45.110807,-93.54695 3&spn=0.064802,0.085316&t=k&hl=en
I mapped my house in Chelsea, MA (reasonably detailed since it's in Metro Boston) and it pointed to a house that's nearly four blocks over.
As opposed to mildly seamless? Mostly seamless?
Seamless is like childless or unique. Qualifiers need not apply.
Why in the hell do they have to do this? If you look closely, there are "2005 Google" watermarks everywhere. What can that possibly do for them?
It is not like it is thier images, these look like they are straight off of TerraServer. TerraServer has an SOAP interface for requesting images and I don't have to see watermarks everywhere.
Oh well, it is convinient to have it integrated with Google Maps.
The crappy part is that some images have cloud cover. This totally obscures the area that I am interested in.
I hope they look into that, and re-map those areas that aren't clear.
Live forever, or die trying.
The U.S. Capitol, House, and Senate buildings are all blurred out, as though they were the naughty bits of pictures on a PG-13 site.
All the other federal buildings in the area, including the Pentagon, aren't blurred. Has anyone noticed other things of which we're apparently not allowed to see satellite imagery? Power plants? Other federal buildings? Area 51?
Of course, if you can get on the roof of any of a number of buildings around the Capitol, you can see everything just fine. And if you take a pair of binoculars with you, you'd get sharper resolution than any satellite pictures most of us have seen, too. Would it be illegal to publish any pictures you might take?
Without looking, I am guessing that if the patches are vaguely fan-shaped, they are baseball/softball/etc diamonds. I've seen these on many other air photos.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
First, it appears that at least the pictures of Boston were taken in very early spring or late fall, as the Boston Common and Garden is brown. Secondly, it is interesting that the higgest resolution is only available for urban areas. I looked up my hometown (Waterloo, IA) when I noticed that the outskirts of the city were blurry. Then I drug down and it said "We're sorry, we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region." While this is a practical approach, since the level of interest here would be lower, it seems like Google would serve this up anyway. This begs the question, is the data simply not available yet? If it is available, why is Google not serving it up? Server load is not a good answer, obviously server capacity is not a problem for Google.
I'm impressed. I like the fact that it works like the map component, and the copyright notifications are not too bothersome (you can see them if you look closely).
Here's a plane coming in for a landing at Boston's Logan airport, cruising over the Harbor Islands:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.329153,-70.95713 1&spn=0.008894,0.012832&t=k&hl=en
This satellite imaging thing reminds me about World Wind. There was a Slashdot on that a day or two ago wasn't there?
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
Quite some time ago, MapsOnUs.com had aerial and satellite photos. I almost started using them over mapquest, but then their aerial and satellite images disappeared. Perhaps it was only available for certain areas (Philly and New Orleans were both available). They allowed the user to switch back and forth between "real" and "map" views.
Anyway, Google maps may be the only service NOW, but it's not an industry first.
-Daniel
Google or DigitalGlobe/EarthSat?
Strange huh?
It's real! It's real! I seen it on the photos. It's not blurred out (yet), so there must be nothing to hide, right? For those needing directions, it's a small round lake to the northwest of Las Vegas. Zoom in and you'll see the runways and such. Zoom in more and you'll see the aliens enjoying a lovely day in the sun.
You never expect irony, do you?
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transparency.
Most OS's support it, so how long before we can overlay the identification text onto the satellite imagery?
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
These image must be very old. In this map the metro station to the north east of my apt is under construction and shows up as a dirt plot, but it's been finished since the early 90's
Terraserver, MapQuest, and others had sattelite imagery years ago. Some have since discontinued it (not sure why), but Google is hardly the first.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I always wanted to see what was in my neighbour's backyard... a pool apparently. (The have a high wood fence). Works for some parts of Canada apparently.
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/9189a5330e5c24252 ede16d1a6f22a45/index.html
....
Isn't this a bit overly ambitious?
It looks like Mass is the only state that they have full res on all the grid squares. Makes the place look like a baren wasteland along political lines...which is kind of funny.
SPAM
For a quick example, I picked my usual drive between State College, PA and Philadelphia PA. Google, wants me to drive 100 miles in the wrong direction. Instead of gong from 322 -> i83 -> turpike, its puts me on 80 east, then has me travel on 81 south, which is almost southwest, then to the turnpike. These directions add at least 100 miles to this very basic trip.
I looked for Area 51 (aka Groom Lake) since Soviet sats had taken pictures of it some time ago. Alas, it is still just the grey area indicating military installation.
Y'all.
Patching satellite photos taken at different times...
http://tinyurl.com/44dn3
I wonder if this is done automatically?
I happened to notice a few posts here about how the US Capitol Building and offices are notably blurred out. I think I have a possible explanation for this phenomenon. At present, the US Capitol is undergoing a lot of work on its grounds for "security" reasons. The whole block around it is pretty much walled off for this construction. I do know, for instance, that they're building a new underground visitor's center for people who want to visit the Capitol and such. My educated guess is that the images are blurred so that nobody can get a bird's-eye view of the construction work, thereby preventing the general public from knowing exactly what kind of security measures and such are being put into place at the Capitol. I would expect that the capitol will probably be de-pixellated once the work is complete and the site has been covered over again with dirt and grass.
Found a night-time image if your neighborhood.
As per usual things are yank only.
Arse
The resolution doesn't seem very high, but the integration is very seamless.
You think? I looked up my address and when you zoom to the highest level you can see my freaking parking space!
This is a little bit freaky.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Now only if their routefinder was as good as Mapquest. I've seen so many bad examples of Google's routefinder giving an absolutely terrible route that I don't know if i'll ever use it. I'll stick with Mapquest. I've never seen bad results.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This is way cool. You can get better (higher resolution) maps of some regions with TerraServer (http://terraserver-usa.com) but the navigation is nowhere near as much fun as with Google maps.
did anybody else notice the edited rooftops of the whitehouse and its surrounding buildings?
link: here
completely understandable, but still interesting.
are any other areas blanked out?
Ok, the real reason is probably a bit more boring, with Keyhole a satellite imaging company being bought by google some months ago.
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Has anyone spotted it on googlemaps? And can we see the aliens please?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You can count the fighter jets and nuclear subs at the military bases here in Virginia...um, what I meant to say is...
Ah, well...So much for Homeland Defense.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
I can see my house in pretty impressive detail...
Although the map portion of maps.google is still only for the U.S., the satelite mode has the whole globe, but only at a large scale.
Here is England, for instance
Humorously, if you scroll outside of the U.S. in map mode, you just get ocean and then back to the U.S. again. It's as if Americans had just obliterated all the other countries...
So move. We didn't want your housing developments anyway. This country used to be beautiful. Now google maps can only show us what we once had.
look at las vegas then search for groom lake.
They had to pay whoever provided that imagry for using it, and when the internet advertising bubble burst, that no longer made cents.
Cents, get it? I kill me.
paintball
I live in a small town in NJ, it's about a mile wide (at most) and at other points maybe 1/2 a mile wide.
The images aren't that old for us. An apartment complex that was finished maybe 2 years ago is up and it looks like it's finished in the image. Also a small street was put in with like 4 houses is there and I think that was done within the last 2-ish years. Beyond that I can't recall any other changes in landscape that could help me narrow it down. But it's not too old for me.
I remember looking at some satellite images of my down in 2000. The picture of my house had a large spruce tree that a storm uprooted around 1995.
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Wize up you guys, there's a whole world out there, and most of it is not America!
Really, its true, I swear it.
Nothing you haven't seen before on the Federation of American Scientists' Groom Lake page, but here it is.
As I'm playing around with the satellite maps, I found myself really wanting another feature, that I would think ought to be easy to implement. Rather than getting a map of a certain address, it might also be useful to get an address of a certain point on the map. In other words, as you're scrolling around the map and looking at stuff, it would be nice if you could just click somewhere and find out the nearest street address.
instead of clear, easy to read maps, you get fuzzy pictures where in some cases you can't even see the road. for instance, where i live just looks like a mass of trees and apartment buildings. a note to google - a map should have street names.
this is an interesting feature, but make it optional, and not the default. i enjoyed the previous maps much more.
sorry about the lack of caps, my shift key is mysteriously nonfunctioning as of 5 minutes ago.
When google maps launched, I enjoyed taking advantage of the high zoom to look at absurd interchanges. Now in reality vision
Reply with your favorite confusing-as-hell-and-the-map-doesn't-help interchanges.
SPAM
$10 for the first person to find Area 51!
The images appear to come from two sources. Non-urban US areas are NASA Landsat-7 images (which, as works of the US Federal government) as public domain. Some urban areas (I looked at Mountain View, CA) are USGS aerial photography montages. Again, as works of the US Federal government, these are public domain too (and available at higher resolutions in WorldWind). Google can only claim copyright over something when they've made a non-trivial contribution toward it (republishing isn't enough). The landsat images have been well montaged and registered, I think by Keyhole (that's difficult to do so well, requiring technique and skill, so that's probably copyrightable). As far as I know, the USGS photos are montaged, registered and adjusted by the USGS, so quite what Google think they've contributed to that is unclear.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
New Google service: locate fighter planes at Kirtland Air Force Base! http://maps.google.com/maps?q=albuquerque,nm&ll=35 .048071,-106.574421&spn=0.005622,0.008208&t=k&hl=e n
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Nice to see they've added the rest of the world in the satellite images. I wonder how long it'll be before they have the maps for the rest of us?
Its incredibly slow right now. I assume its from all the /. traffic its getting.
Looking around my home, I don't see any signs of a large bridge construction project which began last fall. If the images were taken less than, oh, five months ago, certain buildings would be gone, land would be cleared, etc...
Not only are they not the first to do this, the images aren't even very current.
It would be interesting to study the Ramapo and Pequannok (as well as Deleware River) floodplains on this satellite image to determine where all the water came from.
Nearby, I've seen water up to 1st-2nd story windows which didn't even happen when we've had Hurricane Floyd come through. And some parking lots were shown to be poorly designed and totally filled up with pools of water.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Some suggestions to improve this service:
;)
* Remove watermarks, they are disturbing
* Remove the shadows of buildings and such (see lower Manhattan for example).
* the pictures should be taken from the top exactly (aerial photos) or resampled so that the side walls of tall buildings aren't visible anymore. I've read about such a new resampling technique just a couple of weeks ago. Don't remember where though.
* hey, where's the rest of the world?!
My local high school shows the blue track which was finished in Sept 2004, but not the start of construction of the new basketball court (10/23/2004)7 821&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=H igh+School+bartlesv ille,OK&ll=36.732928,-95.971820&spn=0.005064,0.00
Just north of the city, googld refuses to zoom in as much on the lake, that entire area is a different color from an older scan.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
hmm... I like the moving square that shows you what area the zoom will cover. maybe google will get this too.
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If you do driving directions, it will tell you your driving distance, but there's no apparent scale on the maps, so you have no way to estimate distance between arbitrary points. Some kind of clickable interface that gives you distance between two points would be ideal, but even a scale legend would be desirable.
My other gripe is scaling maps. Again, a magnifying type scaling tool would help. No matter how hard I try to center my map view, scaling ALWAYS gets me way off center after about two clicks in magnification.
Beyond that the scrolling interface and the ability to see a WHOLE map and not just some lame 160x120 square is nice.
Check this out, the US Capital Building congressional offices in Washington are totally obscured...d +1st+street,washington,+dc&ll=38.891006,-77.008873 &spn=0.008444,0.010664&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=constitution+ave+an
It's the same with KeyHole as well (screenshot):
http://www.allbootdisks.com/images/keyhole.jpg
Is keyhole doing this to all 'sensitive' targets?
but if you ever want to see why map/satellite overlays can be useful, it's a very handy way of spotting what's been left off maps e.g.
1 63500&scale=25000&mapsize=small&rt=overlay.htm 1 68200&scale=25000&mapsize=small&rt=overlay.htm
http://www.multimap.com/map/photo.cgi?x=459600&y=
and
http://www.multimap.com/map/photo.cgi?x=468000&y=
which are Aldermaston and Burghsfield (atomic weapons places in the UK)
A lot of my neighbors have pools.
.\.\att Clare
Looks like they still have work to do lining up the images. Check out the Boise river and Bronco stadium (yes, blue Astroturf).
o ise,+id&t=k&hl=en/
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1010+Broadway+ave,b
Amazinf - Goodle to offer a new livable planet check it out at betaplanet.google.com ofcourse, its still in beta till the atmophere fills with breathable gases.
I've just read that google is offering a new service again! betaplanet.google.com The planet is located 500 million light years away, google will offer free teleport services. Ofcourse its still in beta, while the planets atmoshpere is filling with breathable gases.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
> If you look closely, there are "2005 Google" watermarks everywhere.
I think they appear on the image when the equivalent area on the map appears "empty"--i.e. in non-built up areas.
--Phil.
http://mygmaps.com/ enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps.
Good ol' Canada, we're not scared of a few satellite pictures!
24 Sussex Drive and Parliament Hill
There's one problem with Google Maps, and that is that the actual images of the maps are downloaded to the client's computer. This is a serious problem in low-bandwidth environments (i.e. thinwire) where the necessary bandwidth to sustain a usable interface might not be available. A vector-based mapping system, where the rendering is done by the client, is much more useful in such cases. For example, I have worked on a system called G-Vis in the past which is designed for use over thinwire.
Dropping to lower-altitutde aerials or a tighet Sat zoom would be a nice future addition (I know each zoom level is an order of magnitude more space required.) This is no less secure than photos I can get from my county auditor's GIS system.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Kinda fun -- I followed the river down from where I live and found Mr. Jello's house here in Western Mass...
8 7&spn=0.004463,0.007017&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.556722,-72.6700
Ha, the Washington Monument looks like something out of an RPG. "Go to the Monument to rescue the Hope Ruby! Beware of the peril!"
..is that a relatively high level of bandwidth is required in order to sustain a usable interface. The reason for this is that the map images themselves are downloaded to the client. Over a thinwire or low-bandwidth environment, a vector-based system where the client does the rendering would probably work better. For example, I have worked in the past on an open-source system in the past called G-Vis.
weird. search for "the white house, washington D.C."
takes you to the right place, but stuff is censored. nice. go national security.
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. -- Anonymous
I never realized this before, but after looking at the imagery for Lake Lanier, I noticed that Google has blanketed all of North America with copyright notices! Everywhere! (c)2005 Google!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I wasted enough time looking at the old maps, just plain vector maps, thinking it was so cool how computers can find my house, and give directions to someplace on the other side of the country.
Now I'm going to spend countless more hours checking out how things have changed, finding places (dirt pits, rivers, powerline cuts, firebreaks, hidden government buildings) that I didn't know were there, and sending people pictures of their homes...
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
They need an overlay mode that lays the nice drawn streets with readable names printed on them but overlayed on top of the sat images.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Still, it sounds better than this Penny Arcade comic.
Me? Karma whore?
BS! You can't see the map (grayed out), but you can turn on the satellite - and it's visible! I for one see clearly an airfield (looks abandoned, yet there is a plane in the middle of the airstrip, and some vehicles that look like trucks).
I really wonder wh###CARRIER LOST
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Confirmed: those clusters of sandy patches north and south of the reservior are in fact baseball diamonds.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You can tell by this map:
e ar+NYC&ll=40.711459,-74.013026&spn=0.007306,0.0106 64&t=k&hl=en
...that some portions use pre-9/11 maps while others don't. In fact, it looks as if the shadows of the WTC are still there in the surrounding tiles.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=St.+Paul's+Chapel+n
Sorry, I'm not trying to be an insensitive clod either.
Get your Unix fortune now!
access to full multispectral with tied ground truth data.
An earlier slashdot story already linked to this very nice, interactive map of Switzerland, that has very similar controls to Google's maps, plus aerial/satellite imagery WITH a street overlay. Also, it has a nice animated effect when you zoom or unzoom!
See here:5 3&spn=0.032444,0.042658&t=k&hl=en
;)
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=43.198586,-77.6302
Notice the big fuzzy section. I used to work there and can tell you that that is Kodak Park (well, whats left of it as Kodak Management lays off the workforce, moves the operations to China, then demolishes the buildings- more layoffs next week).
The entire region is blurred out and unusable, so that you can't see into it.
What I'd like to know is whether or not this is common for other areas (anyone know lat/long of an oil refinery?) and other areas of key civil importance.
Otherwise maybe Kodak doesn't want them spying
Mapquest had this about 3 years ago... I had zoomed into my office and could actually identify my car in the parking lot. I have a great image of Washington D.C. from mapquest too, with the Washington Monument casting a shadow like a big sundial.
MapQuest was supplied with imagery by GlobeXplorer. Both Keyhole (hence Google) and GlobeXplorer use a mix of public and private sources, so some of what you see on one service is also on the other. For example, many states have started taking their own aerial photos, which are made available online. I live in NY, and Google shows me the same image of my house that I can get more easily from NYSGIS (at 1 foot resolution, too, whereas Google only goes down to 1 meter). GlobeXplorer, however, has 6 inch resolution imagery for my area (which was in turn acquired from AirPhotoUSA, I believe), so they show that instead. In general, different imagery providers will have different groups of datasets, some of which overlap, so some areas will have the same imagery and some will not.
The Pentagon is not blurred out, but the tops of the white house and both neighboring buildings are coloured in with light green and light brown squares. This is to hide the classified (read small surface-to-air heat-seeking missile, mortar, and gun turret) armament installations. They were sidewinders last time I saw photographs of the top of the whitehouse (mid to late 90's). I'm guessing the pentagon is not blurred out because the armaments for it are provided by ground forces.
OH RIGHT, you have a problem with me being a stalker?
HUMPH *folds arms*
do a search for pizza with your address through google Local and there is an option to use a satelite map instead.
Probably more useful for a search for parks and such. Could see how many baseball diamonds there are or how much room there is for frisbee.
It would be nice to be able to turn on and off various landmark labeling like on NASA's World Wind.
Now if I can just find free small scale online topographical maps of Japan, I'll be happy.
This so called other continents are a government plot to grab more cash from the americans! HA! Finally someone has the guts to tell the truth! THERE ARE NO OTHER CONTINENTS!!!
Earth is pretty much flat.
You can't handle the truth.
Wow, I guess Google MAPS is completely SOL, huh?
So, what, you wanted intel-grade satellite maps for free from a company providing driving directions? That's a little silly.
And yes, I work with Satellite imagery.
Then presumably you don't need to get it from google, hmmm?
I am not sure what the age of the Data is. There is a house next to mine that burned down a long time ago. And zooming in on Albany NY there is a bridge missing that was put in like 5 years ago.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here's a start.
Although Google doesn't provide metadata for its photographs, compare this USGS aerial on terraserver
with this "satellite" photo on google, paying particular attention to the location of vehicles and shadows.
Looks the same to me.
but i guess facts arent really much in the face of drooling breathless geeks
I'm looking at my house right now. A tree that was cut down early in 2003 is still there. A circular path started in summer 2002 (made by exercising a horse, so it's very visible) is also there. And by the amount of greenery here in the desert, and that our veggie garden had already died off, it is probably early in the dry season. So at least in my neighbourhood, the image appears to date from about July of 2002.
The resolution is good enough that I can see the single stripe down the middle of a nearby two-lane highway. I can also see two cars and an 18-wheeler. The smallest visible object is a 4x8 sheet of plywood atop the shelter in my corral. I can also see my kennel concrete, which at that point is 15 feet wide, represented by 5 pixels on the saved image (you can pillage them via Moz's Page Info function). So there's the max resolution -- one pixel = about 3 feet (plus or minus some blurring).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Check this site:
.
http://locator.region.waterloo.on.ca/
(warning - I have only seen it work in IE).
The region of Waterloo (ON, CAN) has aerial photography at 10cm resolution (~4in) in B&W for 2000 and 2003. I've been looking for a house, and this is a really great site for checking out the state of yards without visiting them. You can see trees, fences, the size of driveways, if the house is going to be in the shadow of an apartment building . .
I honestly have no issue with 10cm resolution being available to the general public. No tin foil on my head.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Just like Sim City!
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Non-US territory is not included in Google maps AFAIK, although they seem to have wider satellite coverage, in particular of Latin (North) America - I think they are getting the data from different sources. You can zoom in to varying degrees (not much in Europe, but pretty far in Mexico, Cuba, etc and even more in Bermuda.)
;-)
Canada is the exception, Google now considering it basically part of the US and so providing maps
thinwire? What are you smoking?
Is it just me or is this the cheapest and simplest replacement for a road trip?
No more worrying about flat tires, or pit stops...
I suppose the worst that could happen is falling asleep at the keyboard and waking up finding yourself somewhere in Alaska (and that's only bad if it wasn't your initial destination)
Seriously, I love this service....sent the link around and everyone went searching for their home addresses...and the speed was GREAT!
Kudos to google for continuing to amaze and wow people with this kind of stuff...sure in a few weeks, I'll probably forget it -- but it was great fun, and a useful tool for the 20 minutes we all drooled over it!
"Life ain't interesting till you blow something up" --Anonymous
Search Burlington, VT. After it loads the map, clear the search area and type whores. Funny how Howard Dean and Dean for America comes up.
Anyone else see "2005 google" imprinted on every image of the satellite imagery? I didn't realize they'd copyrighted the whole world like that.
In my neighborhood this looks like the same dataset as terraserver.microsoft.com, right down to the red car parked 2 houses down. (SF Bay Area CA, zip 94549) According to terraserver that data set is "Urban Areas" from 2/2/7/2004 - pretty new data. These are HR aerial, not sat, photos, probably from a commercial service under contract to USGS. And Yes There's a Scale!
I can zoom in a lot farther on terraserver - down to where I can see the white railing of our deck standing out against the back yard.
The image looks better rotated 180 deg; since the airplane was north of my location the parallax makes everything "upside down".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The Rochester Airport is blurred, too- ROC is probably imaged WAY more than any airport due to RIT's flyovers, but nothing is in the public database.
Interesting...
This site also has on-demand satellite imagery.
10100111001
I can see my house from here.
Integrate it with Amazon's A9 so we can get not just a satellite view of shopping centers/houses/buildings but a street-level view. That way we can see if 123 Main Street really is the address we want, instead of guessing by the type of air conditioning unit they have on the rooftop.
vancouver (and the whole lower mainland) works perfectly at the highest level of detail (they look like aerial photos more than satellite)
-- the cake is a lie
They are way out of date for where I am as it doesn't have any of the post hurricane stuff from last summer.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
exactly. there's nothing 'new' about what google did. There never is. They just do it better.--
TheWolfkin
Yes, it's a nice feature.
But, what everyone want to know: Could we find a satellite picture that will show us something unusual, but interesting that is unusual in these pictures? Like a forest fire or a house fire? An explosion? A big car accident?
Come on Slashdotters! If everyone who read this try with his own address, I'm sure we can find something! Please post your discoveries in reply to this post so we can all see them!
Montreal - Best city to live in!
1 meter per pixel is about the resolution you need in order to navigate a map. You can recognize houses (15 to 20 pixels) on a screen easily. Unfortunately if they give you, say, 4 meters per pixel, then a jpg block is 32meters x 32meters. If the compression is set too high (and it usually is) you'll get rid of most of the DCT terms that give you the actual detail.
Worse of all, you may get 'fake' data from the compression process.
Thus, 1 meter per pixel JPGd is what you need to see quiet well. Can you see a person? Probably not- you might see a fuzzy single pixel that represents his bald head reflecting daylight, but thats about it.
Thinwire is just a term used to describe an environment with low and unreliable bandwidth.
Ooops - it is different data. The arrangement of junk in some neighbor's backyards is different.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The Sat images are marked with a faint 'google', just in case you forgot who belonged to all our base.
Cool - I can see my house. Wait a minute... If I'm at work, who is that son of a bitch parked in my driveway!?!?!
If you want to hide where the antiaircraft batteries are, try painting out the roofs of a *lot* of buildings in the area, not just the ones with batteries. Or carefully photoshop in a roof on the building with the real battery and do obvious paint jobs on unrelated buildings. Then again, maybe they did this already.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/211325 3
Hey, I found Pac Man.
Seriously, anybody know what this is?
Is it just me, or does everything look a little bit stretched out of perspective? I understand that images may not have been taken from directly overhead, but I am sure that this could have been corrected in post processing.
I think you have found the top-secret Moving Pictures Experts Group proving grounds. This is where they test out the next versions of JPG and MPG compression, in an out-of-the-way part of the country where they think no-one will ever see it. They need some work on this one; methinks: looks pretty lossy. It looks like they messed up that lake pretty bad, but we all know how lax Utah's water quality regulations are.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
First thing that came to mind was how this is Google's way of arming the unknown soldier. We are at 'war' with terrorism and this is like a field day shopping spree for a terrorist. Its rather frightening to see all the military and strategic locations right on my screen in full color. Wonder if Google cares?
--- Old Time NeXThead
There seems to be two very different image sets in use with very different resolutions. For example, look up "L4K 1X1" and then zoom in. The data on the left is much lower-res than the data on the right, and in fact doesn't zoom to the three highest zoom levels, whereas the data on the right lets you zoom in to the point of being able to count parked cars.
I was playing around with the satellite image feature last night( and submitted a story on it that was rejected :( ), and although this is a cool feature I think that Google should improve their address/map search first. The search for an adress is not so great and actually gets annoying- Google Maps fails to find adresses which Mapquest easily maps. I love Google Maps, I just think that for a Search company they can most definately improve their adress/map seach.
-just my share
I looked up my house - the satelite imagery is a full block off. Although I live in California, I don't remember a recent earthquake that moved things around quite that much.
TerraServer have this for years. They even have a webservice API.
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/default.aspx
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/webservices.aspx
Slashdot so used to make all kinds of unqualified comments.
If you pull up the satellite imagry and search for Rachel, Nevada, look northeast and notice the two huge airstrips? Area 51 :)
I also noticed that while I can find my house in fairly good resolution, for some reason I can't zoom in closer on the Groom Dry Lake area....
Hey, the pictures of Logan must be after July 2003, because that's when my suitcase was lost there, and I just now spotted it - some jackass handler apparently tossed it up on the roof of a jetway.
They seem to do a pretty nice job of getting routes to plot on top of the streets on the photos. This is tricky with photos because of the effect of topography and photogrammetric effects (e.g. you can see a point on a bridge and a point directly under it if you are not directly over it).
In part they avoid this by not letting you zoom in too close, but still somebdoy did a nitpicky job of registering a lot of relatively small photo squares.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just try printing out one of these satellite images on your black and white printer and then try to use it to drive to someplace you want to go that you've never been before.
In my opinion, if google wants to have the best map site, they should stop focusing on how cool it is to play with online and try to make maps that are **useful when you print them out and try to use them to get somewhere**.
Here's what I can't understand: when you press the "print" button on any of the mapping websites I've been to, you get a crappy low-res bitmap that's hardly legible when you print it out. It's obvious that the maps are stored in a vector-based format on the server end. When I press 'print', why don't they send it to me in vector-based form (e.g., a PDF file), so that it looks clear when I print it out? Now that would be something useful. Nevermind the satellite photos.
As many others have noted, the datasets are often several years old. I was interested in using this service to check out new construction areas since I'm looking to buy a new home. Unfortunately, these areas didn't even have roads a few years back, so the google images don't remotely resemble current reality.
When you print out a map, it doesn't fill the page the way it adjusts to fills your screen.
There's NO SCALE!!! Holy Shite, what kind of map doesn't indicate the scale somewhere?
You can't (easily) save the images as gif/jpg.
The sattelite maps are commonly misaligned by 50-100 feet.
It's insanely impressive for a new beta product though. They've already replaced mapquest as my favorite directions/maps site.
Take a look at http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.882874,-73.16027 6&spn=0.271568,0.232430&t=k&hl=en
Those green areas are things like railway stations, habours, and airports.
My theory here is that they want to make it easy for the bad guys to collect target lists.
The center of the image matches the center of the map. But the image is seriously squashed, at least at my latitude (Seattle). Compare the streets at the top of the map to the streets at the top of the image.
You will really notice the squashing if you compare the image in Google Maps to the image you get in Keyhole.
That feature is awesome! I sent this as a suggestion to Google, including a link to multimap.
its distortion from all the hot air coming out...
I submitted this news last night, I wonder why it was not posted. Before you mod me down or reply with flames.. I must tell you that I have read the FAQ and find no reason why that story should have been rejected and this one accepted... read http://animeshpathak.blogspot.com/2005/04/on-googl e-maps-slashdot-and-yours.html for my complaints on this issue.
I wonder why, I wonder why, .. I wonder why I wonder [with apologies to Richard Feynman]
"- What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"- You ask a glass of water."[from h2g2]
I am impressed by the speed of loading the initial map, then the panning and zooming. Especially compared to the slow MicroSoft Terrascope and Mapquest options.
I went through my address book and looked at siblings houses, friends, and previous places I've lived. Could be a great real estate aid to see recreation and commercial context of location I was interested in. I see it as a way of recommending hiking and running locations too.
When typing in an address, there is a default zoom level (3, to give it an arbitrary marker). Trying a few locations in my area, that default level has no satellite data. It would be nice of them to decrease the zoom unti an actual viewable area is displayed. For example, this random location in Newark, OH automatically comes up as "does not have imagery for this zoom level." If they checked to see if there were imagery at that level and eased back on the zoom until there was imagery, it would be an improvement. (Well, technically speaking... Newark is not the prettiest place.)
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
This is what I'm looking for from Gmaps, and overlay of the easily read roads and the satellite imagery.
http://www.lundequam.net/files/gmap.jpg
Now, I had to skew these to make it work, so I'm sure this would be nowhere near easy.
With all the other features Gmaps has, this would just top it off nicely.
and they'd rather sweep this under the rug.
Ex: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.248459,-115.8063 70&spn=0.013990,0.016780&t=k&hl=en
"We're sorry but we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look."
Although I'm being somewhat critical, I still think the satellite photos are a cool feature...
Looks like Google Maps got slashdotted. The Satellite option returns a completely blank map.
The grey buildings just north from the village of Bure (http://map.search.ch/bure.en.html) are military buildings. Been there. They should blur them out.
. . . On the shores of Lake Washington. Look for the three-pronged dock right in the middle.
Bill's House
How difficult would it be to generate a rough 3d first person view? Integrate USGS topo maps with info based on 3d satellite images, to determine dimensions of buildings. With the roads, it could be fairly convincing. Yeah?
See CNN for good coverage of the issue.
cool anyways i guess...
int main(){ char ln[0]; ln[15]=(ln[14]=(ln[13]=(ln[12]=(ln[11]=(ln[10]=((l n[0]=((ln[1]=((ln[2]=((l
I actually saw Noahs ark sailing up the Chesapeake Bay.
There is an especially high resolution satellite image of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where the streets of Burning Man 2003 are plainly visible.
Search Gerlach, NV and then scroll towards the northeast.
Cool.
I live in Washington, DC and did a quick search for my house on Capitol Hill. Pretty nifty; can make out my neighborhood with ease. Then I scrolled to the west a bit to look at the Capitol. Its all blurred out! I kept moving west some more and took a look at 1600 Penn. Ave - the White House is not there!
Is it just me or did Yahoo Maps offer the feature to switch from a map view to an aerial view of the address you had mapped a littler while back.
I'm not sure how long ago, maybe about a year or two, this feature disappeared. But I am sure it was there. Although I doubt it was at this resolution.
Armen Abrahamian
Thanks for getting them to do this. I've asked for things, and they don't listen to me. Can get get them to give me a job?
Mapquest used to offer aerial photos along with their maps.
And notice how many govt' locations are blurred or removed with a message that Google doesn't have that level of zoom detail for a region? Even the Microsoft TerraServer project used to have Area 51 (Groom Lake AFB - shot under part of the open skies treaties) then one day it was removed. Hmm, maybe the images are back now. Can't recall the long/lat of the base...
So if you can see the airplane and its shadow, doesn't that tell you where the satellite is/was? http://maps.google.com/maps?q=dfw+airport&ll=32.91 8773,-97.052397&spn=0.004442,0.006394&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.924874,-122.2719 31&spn=0.007843,0.010664&t=k&hl=en
At least I think so. Look at the size of the cars and planes compared to it.
As a DC resident I noticed that the White House and Capital are presented without detail and fuzzed out. Check it out with zip code 20513. What's missing in your town?
Sheez? Three years? Try like 1950's for Granite Shoals, Texas lakeside on Lake LBJ. My parent's house isn't even there, and many other houses that I KNOW were built in the 50's or 60's aren't there either. It's almost like they took an old B&W and colorized it. Yet, right across the cove from where their house should be, the construction that took place over the past three years is there in plain sight. Weird. It's like they merged two datasets into one pic.
If you look at DC, you find that the White House is at the same resolution as its surrounding. The Capitol is at a MUCH lower resolution. Is there some law against an accurate sat photo of the Capitol? If so, why isn't there one for the White House?
any ideas on how to search nationwide for other areas that have been censored? by looking for what's hidden/obscured, you may stumble across something that you would otherwise ever hear about...
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.084162,-114.0216 17&spn=0.004957,0.007135&t=k&hl=en
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please, google doesn't own enough satellites for anywhere near this amount of land cover.
Gotta understand that satellites are constantly taking pictures of the world, but its not like google has rights to them or can get them for cheap enough cost.
The dates will vary as will the quality and angle of the images.
New York as was mentioned is taken from a bad angle (not directly on top of) so take it as you will.
Go to mappy.com.
Search for a big city. I've only tried Brussels.
There's a Transparency slider at the top left.
Mappy has had satellite maps with transparency for at least a few months. It has been truly interactive for ages. I have no idea why nobody's mentioned this, and why anybody thinks Google's US-only, slow, hardly interactive maps are any good at all.
it varies...looks like they dont have complete
coverage...try eastern mass then try Ithaca NY.
ithaca will only zoom so far then give you an
error message.
But wow is it fast!
IE 6.0.2900
XP SP2
That's a pretty common browser and OS combo.
I lived for a few years in Tijuana, Mexico, and it looks like TJ and most border towns are completely mapped at the highest resolutions, as well. I could spot the house where I stayed and everything. You have to search for San Ysidro, CA and then drag southward, though. Here's a link to the border crossing gate. The line dividing the screen is the "iron curtain" -- The wall between the countries built by the US.
---
Obviously, at such a speed, the "Titanic 2" captain has lost it completely.
No, you misunderstood me. I send them a suggestion to do the little road map overlay over the satellite imagery like in multimap. I *did not* mean to imply that I had suggested satellite imagery in general.
Nice map of the US of A. What happened to the rest of the #@!& planet? Thanks guys...
http://www.redfin.com/ provides satellite images of the Seattle area, for looking up houses for sale. It also features streets/parks/etc overlays, and real-time zooming. It's flash-based though, so different tech from the way Google's doing this...
mappy.fr has a map interface that allows you to blend transparently map & satelllite
I for one welcome our new all-seeing, all-knowing Internet overlords.
There's some cool artifacts on the map. Look, I found a jet contrail: somewhere in canada complete with shadow. It really gives you a sense of how high up your perspective is. Well, it would do so better with a scale, but there ya go. -Lep
I am allowed to criticize you: you are not allowed to criticize me. Sorry, that's just how things are.
They fixed their opera support. It works now.
SSL Certificate
try World Wind and make fun of me for erratic posting
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
We use Mapserver using the GDAL/OGR and GeoTIFF libraries (and ECW wavelet images when I get some time). Using GeoTIFF alone (which provides image indexing and pyramiding), I have 10,000 x 15,000 pixel, 4 Gb images that render in a fraction of a second. Mapserver includes tools for image tiling as you describe, but we only bothered with that when we hit filesystem file size limits for individual images. ECW will giv us much smller file sizes, and the EPPL7 format supported in GDAL apparently has some good performance features.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
to maps as both of the digital maps and images are well georeferenced.
these services never have any australian content.
niffty technology, not really relevent to me though.
Either way. You seem to have a power over them that mere mortals among us dare not dream of. And I'm only 15% sarcastic.
Nice. Those google engineers must be loading up on Google Gulp!
Much of Google's images are at least twice as high-res as MultiMap's. You must have been looking at one of the low-res areas.
~CGameProgrammer( );
Many more fighter planes, helicopters, bombers, oh my! (Pima Air & Space Museum, Arizona)
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.
Can't be that low - have a look at this parking lot. I can clearly see the lines on the parking spaces and they're no wider than 8 inches.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I would love to see a site dedicated to a gallery of satellite 'Easter Eggs', as described here:l ite-maps-easter-eggs.html. The post gives a few examples (Kennedy Space Center, Hawaii, some ships in SF). It would be very cool. Anyone seen this?
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-satel
An amusing note--the images need a bit of updating. The big Ikea they built in East Palo Alto is shown as a patch of empty land. More amusingly, the site for Google HQ is a dry patch of grass. ^_^ Ah well, hats off to a wonderful innovation anyway!
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.889713,-77.00903 2&spn=0.007317,0.011029&t=k&hl=en
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!