Google Earth In 4D

Rockgod writes to tell us about Google Earth's latest expansion. From the article: "Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today." I suppose a link to Earth4 would have been good.

Comments

A link to Google Earth would have been useful

[Anonymous Coward]

http://earth.google.com/earth4.html

If it's not spatial it's not 4D

[Jekler]

The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously. People who have no concept of the significance of a 4th dimension have grabbed hold of this concept and ride it into the ground.

Under the definition that time is a 4th dimension, Guild Wars, Quake, Morrowind, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2... they would all have the appearance of being a 4D games. Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.

Furthermore, spatial dimensions are interchangeable. Width/Height/Depth are all the same thing and only have meaning in relation to the others. Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions. You can't have an object composed of x, y, t and still have the same dimensions as an x, y, z object. (3ft x 3ft x 3s) doesn't mean the same thing as (3ft x 3ft x 3ft)

Things do not sound inherently cooler by calling them 4D. Web 2.0 has brought with it many things, but a 4th dimension is not one of them. I'd rant some more but my 4D microwave has finished cooking my 4D hotpocket, and I need to grab that sucker before the 4th dimension causes it to be misshapen with lost heat!

Re:Medieval London here I come!

[mikael]

They may not have had satellite imagery, but many artists and painters were hired to draw maps and paintings of the city to precise scale in perspective view.

Here is a supersized scan of a medieval map of London from the 1600's. Using some projective texture mapping/morphing, it should be possible to place this map on top of the Google maps of London.

Re:today's maps will be historical

[famebait]

The "darkness" of the dark ages is severely exaggerated. True, the loss central power resulted in a lot of warring that had previously been confined to the outer frontiers of the empire, but most of the other "bad things" about it were equally present in roman society. The roman empire was not as enlightened and civilized a time as many seem to think. Their great strength was in military strategy and administration, but there was very little technological and philosophical progress (compared to its duration) from what the greeks already had. In fact the middle ages were much more productive in that department.