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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.
looks a little boring
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.
i know all the words in that title, but i just can't parse that sentence.
Magrathea sues for copyright infringment.
So I've been living on the alpha version this entire time?
Why am I on Slashdot? I'm bored. Why am I bored? I'm on Slashdot.
Ah, that's better. My dosage of Google news. Now I can start my day!
"Earth is still in beta? After 3 billion years?"
Gmail will probably be a beta just as long.
http://photos11.flickr.com/16639588_c9da324958_o.j pg
Um...
Why does it look like Indiana isn't mapped?
There are lots of worse states out there...
As a Google user that is beyond you're planet, I take offense to the fact that Google *only* included EARTH in there initial release!
Wake me when they release one with a Total Perspective Vortex. I've got a fairycake craving.
--
make install -not war
Because there's still several billion bugs in the system :D
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
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.
For the last 4.5bn years we have struggled with an alpha version of the Earth.
We can all remember Earth 0.1 , which was flat.
Earth 0.2 was spherical but still lodged in the center of the universe.
Earth 0.3 has served us well for over 200 years, but is still buggy as hell. The tectonics engine constantly crashes, causing massive earthquakes.
I have good hopes for the beta of Earth, but for the final release I, and many users like me would like a bigger planet.
Planning terrorist operations, didn't you read the /. article about the government passing a law to make it easier to get your records from your ISP? They want to know who downloaded Google Earth, duh!
I'm a pilot, and it's durned handy to be able to get a satellite eye's view of an airport I haven't been to before, so's I can pick out some landmarks. It's not that easy spotting a weedpatch airstrip from the air the first time over it, and the aerial photos in Keyhole help, especially the slant view feature.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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.
We didn't need Google to tell us that
Looking at this picture gave me some idears... So, how about putting all this data in a new game?
;)
Behold! I present to you... (drum roll)
Grand Theft Auto : New York!
Humor note : Try our new live edition
No sig for now.
Cue posts about possible uses for terrorism.
Wasps and ants are features not bugs
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Nasa has a pretty cool mapping program as well.
World Wind 1.3
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
The servers are a little slow but its still a handy program.
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.