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Google Releases Earth to Beta
Cros13 writes "Google has released a beta of it's Google Earth software to subscribers of the existing Keyhole service. New features include 3D models of buildings in selected cities, input from your gps receiver and a better search system. I have posted screenshots here and here." This product is in competition with Microsoft's Virtual Earth, as we reported earlier.
Why wasn't a link to the Windypundit article placed in the blurb?
It's just off the page and contains a lot more information.
Take the functionality of Google Maps and make it into a local application, and that's what you get here. Instead of JAvascript-powered click-n-drag scrolling, it's OpenGL or Direct3D buttery-smooth, with texture filtering to ease some of the pixelation on the imagery.
The most amazing part is the driving directions--they're plotted out in front of you on the zoomable and scrollable earth, like Streets and Trips on steroids.
The ability to measure arbitrary lines and paths, carried over from the previous version of Keyhole, adds a nifty dimension. Instead of staring at a feature in the satellite imagery and wondering, "How big is that, anyway?", you can measure it and find out. I used it to definitively settle which of the two routes I can take home from work is shorter.
For $29, this app delivers, per dollar, more fun and utility combined than anything else I've ever purchased. You can use the layering features to do extremely useful stuff, like highlight the locations of ATMs, school district boundaries, golf courses, parks, show crime statistics, and even show placemarks set by people on the Keyhole web forum ("Look! I found a cool thing here!").
Sounds a bit like I'm babbling, but this thing is seriously hella-cool.
As an engineer, Google Earth (or in my case, more likely MS's Virtual Earth since MS has at least hinted at Mac compatibility via Firefox, while Google Earth seems to be Windows only), would be a godsend - I spend a lot of time looking over aerial photos to identify buildings (or 'sensitive receptors' as we call them in the noise biz) and the more detail we can get, the better we can make our estimates.
For example, having a clearer indication of building height or terrain features can help us create better sound propagation models that accounts for shielding or diffraction. Sure, GE/VE won't give us exact values, but every little bit helps. Topo maps help a bit, but if you've ever had to model an area with complex geometry (say San Fran or Seattle) topos become unwieldy pretty quickly.
We spend a lot of money right now sending people to certain project areas to help get a better sense of the terrain and building geometries. Having an fairly accurate 3D model of these features can save hundreds of thousands of dollars just in travel costs.
I recently purchased a home long distance, and using Keyhole was just about the only way I can imagine doing something like that. Being able to get a bird's eye view of a potiential house, overlaying local light rail and subways (with correct colors for the lines no less), finding nearby restaurants and shops, viewing local crime stats, and creating custom "push pins" in a folder structure to track all of the homes were just some of the indispensable features present in Keyhole that Google Maps just didn't cover adequately.
As a Keyhole subscriber, I was given an upgrade to the Beta of Google Earth, and man... almost everything on my "wish list" that I made while using Keyhole is present in gEarth. I wish I had this when I was buying my house!
A friend and I were out hiking this weekend and thought about how nice it would have been to see a satellite topo image of our route ahead of time or even to be able to plan trips that way. We both conceded that it was just a matter of time, with the advent of Google Maps.
This type of program just confirms it. I think it would be tremendously useful although it seems like a stretch at this point, that it would feature actual trails. Mapping streets has been done but inputting trails and their exact elevations and routes seems trickier.