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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:
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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.
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...
In the upper right corner click 'satellite'. Took me a while too. ;)
Look for the "Map - Satellite" in the top right corner and click Satellite.
Decode these
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.
Satelite photo of the whitehouse - on Google maps
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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.
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.
my comic
hmmm, I'm sure the whitehouse roof isn't quite that plain in real life :-)
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.
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 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.
Google is watching.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.962159395217896, -93.5434341430664&spn=0.008153915405273438,0.01179 0990829467773&t=k&hl=en
All is Number -Pythagoras.
Is there a "donate" button anywhere? I feel I should be paying them for all their services. Apparently they are doing alright without donations.
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
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.
To you and all the others who made this suggestion (and who were modded as "insightful" rather than "redundant") the maps thing is still only a BETA after all. One day soon, the mighty google will give you all your christmas presents, with added paranoia.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
http://mygmaps.com/ enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps. It includes a standalone viewer so you can show your custom map on your site.
--Phil.
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.
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...
Nor are the buildings next door a flat green color on top.
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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
$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.
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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.
Yeah, it was the second place I searched for (after my house). http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Rachel,Nevada&ll=37. 249146,-115.809631&spn=0.129948,0.191231&t=k&hl=en
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?
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
You're both quite correct. See the SecurityFocus article "Secret Service airbrushes aerial photos". Note that the link to the old vs new images has changed since the article was written - they're now here. You might notice a remarkable similarity between a couple of the retouched pictures and Google's White House imagery.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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
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.
these look like they are straight off of TerraServer
The Google images are not straight off of TerraServer. Actually to even say that perpetuates a misnomer. TerraServer is not a source of imagery. It simply serves public-domain USGS images which were created using our tax dollars. I'm not complaining, they are serving the public interest, but I'd be upset if they started putting watermarks on them or claiming copyright.
The Google images come from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite. This is a private, for-profit corporation which raised enough money to put up their own satellite and start taking pictures which they are now selling on the open-market. I'm sure that their contract with Google necessitates the watermarks. Fair enough.
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.
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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
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!?!?!
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if you don't like the free service google offers, you said it yourself - mapquest already does it apparently. AND... it's 3 fewer letters to type in than maps.google.com. So there's your answer.
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.
Isn't the point of beta to test and criticize it?
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.
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.
and they'd rather sweep this under the rug.
See CNN for good coverage of the issue.
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
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?
Is that why the aerial photographs of the area where I live are identical between TerraServer and Google, down to the cars on the street?
Look at Capitol Hill in Seattle (try 100 Broadway E, Seattle, WA). Then claim those photos are off different satellites. They might not have gotten them straight from TerraServer, but they didn't get them from DigitalGlobe either.
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.
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.
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Yup, you're right, that is USGS Urban images. Google definitely shouldn't be watermarking them. At the very least they need to credit USGS. Does anybody know what the USGS usage policy is?