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Google Earth Launching For Free
Nathan Weinberg writes "Google launches Keyhole 3 today, rebranded Google Earth, and are dumping the subscription rate (except for a $20/year "plus" versions with prettier pictures) available soon at earth.google.com. The program lets you fly around a 3D globe, with overhead satellite photos, tilted 45-degree photos, 3D rendered buildings, and overlays that display everything from roads to hotels to bike routes. I have a lot of info and screenshots at InsideGoogle, and Search Engine Watch has a big writeup. With yesterday's Google Video release, this is shaping up to be a major week for the search giant."
It is like NASA World Wind, but better.
C'mon...
Wow, this is great. The images are better than what they have for Google Maps, at least for my house (I can zoom in a lot farther). And the tilting and rotating are really fun. They have a few famous sightseeing places included by default, and just rotating and zooming around the Three Sisters or Yosemite was almost breathtaking. Integrating with their direction and local services is probably a good idea, though I doubt I'll use it much, but the images themselves are very well done. Good job, Google.
Its actually pretty addictive for a GIS geek like myself. Plus it was neat to have it help me plan my camping trip this weekend.
It totally blows away any geographical user interface ESRI or Autodesk or anyone else has. They should be embarrassed with their current ArcIMS and MapGuide products - such rudimentary interfaces and poor performance.
Whats even more interesting is the Google Earth Enterprise suite. Being able to load my own satellite data and GIS data into this would be interesting. But like I've said before in other posts about google maps, the biggest problem for GIS groups would be the lack of an "Identify" tool (perhaps its there but I havent seen it in any of the screenshots). And still no scale bar at the bottom either, though they do have a north arrow.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Get your own free personal location tracker
New York is full of them. Just use the Shift-Arrow combinations to tilt the view.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
We're working on it.
Well, I guess Slashdot already have a quite complete coverage of Google stuff, but if you wan't to beat the rush for some hours I recommend the Google Blog (with RSS)
won't run under wine on my machine, but I didn't expect it to, when a page talks about what video cards it runs with you can be pretty sure an OS emulator is out of the question.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
No go on my machine (Debian Sarge)
The installer failed with regular Wine, with WineX 3.3-1 it installed but still wouldn't run.
Since they are working on a Mac version I imagine they will also at least look into releasing a Linux port.
Its not Google branded, but you can tie into a GPS with Google Earth Pro.
Atlanta has them.
Also, after installing it, it seemed that 3D Buildings is turned off by default. Make sure that option is checked in the left-hand option pane.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
There are some pretty good satellite images available.
G .jpg - LG.jpg
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/area51/Area51-072503-L
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/area51/Area51-4M072503
You can compare them with google maps, it was posted yesterday.
Should you consider that the "plus" version is not worth the 30 USD you shelled out for it three days ago, Google offers you a refund. The refund is pro-rated according to the number of months of the year you have been using your subscription.
Here
I think it goes without saying that I wish I could update TFA. When I wrote it at 1 AM, 13 hours before it hit /., Earth hadn't yet been uploaded to the web, so "launching" in the title and "available soon" in the article haven't been accurate for many hours. Also, I would have mentioned the enterprise versions of Earth, which can cost a butt-load of money for those interested.
It works under wine!!!! Version 20050111-r1. I had to switch to fluxbox after it repeatedly crashed kde, it uses qt so maybe that was problems, its also somewhat unstable and requires working opengl
...but doesn't this promote terrorism to a certain extent?
Since you posted this as a reply to the What about Linux? thread, it seems reasonable to assume that Google has already thought of this and they deduced that terrorists don't use Windows.
What you want is Celestia. It does exactly what you are looking for, even including dozens of recently discovered extrasolar planets!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
If you look at the product comparison on the Google Earth website it says that the measure area feature is in Google Earth Pro. http://earth.google.com/product_comparison.html
3D Buildings are simple grey projections of major city buildings overlayed on the city map. They don't look great yet, but they are fun.
I found Vegas by accident and compiled this list from previous answers.
Las Vegas
New York
San Francisco
Boston
Cleveland
Denver
Atlanta
From Google:
Google Earth has 3D buildings listed in a number of major US cities including Boston, MA; Cleveland, OH; and Washington, D.C. to name a few. To view these:
1. Turn on the 3D building layer by selecting the check box in the dashboard.
2. Position the viewer within a reasonable viewing altitude over a major city such as San Francisco. The 3D buildings start to appear from an eye-elevation of 10-12,000 feet. Check the eye-elevation meter on the lower right of the 3D viewer to determine your current viewing height. The 3D buildings appear as light grey objects over the imagery of the city. As you zoom in, more details will appear until you can see the entire shape of a building.
3. Use the tilt and rotate tools to get the best view of the buildings.
I was a Keyhole subscriber for a little over a year before google bought them.
As nice of an improvement the Google Earth software is, overall the product has become worse since google bought it.
The overall resolution has been decreased from many covered areas and super high-res areas have been removed entirely.
You used to be able to clearly make out the exact shapes of cars in the SF Bay Area, now they are blurry colored blobs. In the super high res areas, you could pretty much identify the model of most cars and sometimes even make out individual people.
If you are a long time subscriber like me, google placates you with an option to login to the 'legacy' database.. but if you are new.. no dice.
Doesn't that seem strange? I really hope they reintegrate the higher res data, it is profoundly better.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that when they increased their coverage area they had technical issues with the highest res data, but it's been awhile now and they havn't changed their stance of "Oh.. umm yea..login to legacy.." since the new primary database came out.. so I'm fairly worried.
seeing as so many of you have started threads there is no main one to post this to, look at the screenshot. There IS A LINUX VERSION.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
The Google Earth Plus version *does* work in offline mode, displaying data from the local disk-cache. If you upgrade to Plus, set you cache size to maximum (500MB), and then create placemarks for your waypoints, you will be able to revisit the same areas when operating in offline mode.
Be seeing you, Seer
Yes it works under Wine.
4
Here is the relevant AppDB entry with instructions and screenshots:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=325
No, but I did think how GoogleEarth + Orbiter would = wow!
Google have closed their downloads for Earth.
See http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4659.html for mirrors.
Not sure which version is the latest, but MajorGeeks have "Google Earth 3.0.0336 Beta"