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Google Earth 4.3 Offers a Number of New Features
GoogleWatch writes "Google's all excited for Earth day, and just in time there's a new version of Google Earth available. 4.3 offers up revamped navigation controls, 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities, and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises. Also new in Google Earth 4.3 is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just click any of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up. The sunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Fly to a location you'd like to see and click the "sun" button in the toolbar. That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit play or drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold."
I understand, from recent news events, that Google Earth will also allow for a new 'driveway' view for some up-close-and-personal looks at everybody's favorite geriatric nude sunbathers. Can't wait!
I love Google Earth but I think they should revisit their decision of replacing new images with older ones if they have better resolution.
I'm sure that's a good decision but a city like New York, but in areas recently developed it just doesn't make sense.
Any number? pi? 2+3i?
Damn google hippies with their fancy schmancy cameras all over my front lawn....
Off!!! GET OFF !!!!
Can't you see the signs that say {NO GOOGLE HIPPIES} {NO DOGS} {NO SALESMEN}
WHy I otta....
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
How does it handle the sunrise/sunset shots for locations that enjoy periods of 24x7 daylight during the summer? Does it (correctly) show the sun rotating around the sky?
This is slightly offtopic, but... I live in Argentina. This country has been excluded from Google Maps since its beginning (Google Maps'). It's the only excluded country in Google Maps, I guess.
If you search for it you will see that the map is just a white area. Not even the major cities, or the capital. We only have satellite images. Does anyone reading this know what's going on?
They need to set up "wasd" controls for movement.
I'd love to strafe jump around town!
Cities are cool. Underwater would be cooler. With special underwater lighting. And little spiffy killer fishies at the bottom on the Marianas trench. Or a way to see coral before we succeed in killing all of it off.
Where's the underwater google truck-a-subtomic?
Or near-earth orbit, so we can see the junk?
How about updating the images. They must be five years old. Things change, buildings get built and torn down.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you have 4gb or more the images wont load correctly and are very blurry. If you limit to 3gb at boot the program will load the zoomed in images correctly and clearly but then the program will crash because of a nasty memory leak which also destableizes your system.
Why does google hate people who want 4gb of ram, there are quite a few of us and 64bit desktops have been around since 2003.
Why would anyone use this BULKY stand alone application when a light weight browser based http://maps.live.com provides a better birds eye view, 3D views and more. Crazy Uh!
I hear that Google Earth will be allowing users to control the spy satellites directly in version 4.4.
Imagine getting a live feed of when your boss leaves his house, and then tracking him all the way to work. I'll never be late again!
Well they're certainly photos of buildings, just not realistic photos of buildings.
Well, they certainly have free models on 3D warehouse. They're just all in a format Google Earth can't read without a plugin for a commercial operating system.
They certainly have 3D graphics, just not the 5 lines of code that it would take to support 3D anaglyphs. Everyone's killing themselves stacking screen shots to work without this simple feature.
Weirdness prevails and its not even Halloween yet.
A. Google Updater required for 4.3 won't run because "Google Updater is already installed"
Then my current version: 4.2.0205.5730 has some quite annoying problems. Running the thing always comes up with the following errors.
1. A big RED "I X" in the upper left corner. Something failed to install.
2. Tip of the Day problems.
2a. "Could not load images" Stream0_0
2a. "Fetch of ScreenOverlay failed (Stream0_0);" "Ignore"
2b. "Could not load images" Stream0_0
2b. "Fetch of ScreenOverlay failed (Stream0_0);" "Ignore"
3. No online updates.
Regular Earth 1.0 Still Sucking
Hook it up to a GPS unit, I have a cheap USB NEAMA device, cache the area and stick it in yer laptop and go explore. You can find routes you would never even know about any other way. Pictures, quite hi res here, trucks easy to see, and a GPS unit is a killer combination in the bush.
;).
Regular GPS units give you a topo map at best. I fly down valleys in 3D and examine the features, routes and possible routes from any angle on a hi res picture of the area. As I'm in that valley with my laptop I can quickly check what's possible. Dirt bike helps for the 'quickly'
You don't really need Google Earth Plus as the cheap NEAMA devices don't work anyway. There are a plethora of third party apps to fill the gap however. Real time tracking and simple way points applications are easy to find.
Google Earth has no competition in this area outside of possible military applications.
One could use this for planning of landscape photography and how and where the setting sun will be.
How about they finally let you install it to whatever path you want without having to hack your registry ahead of time!
It's still missing the new part of I-355 that is in the Google maps web site.
I updated, but if im not logged in as root i log in to their server!
And being a "beta" it doesnt give me any information, it should at least have a -v flag or a --help flag.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
New features don't amount to much if their maps are 5 years old for Baton Rouge-New Orleans areas. The growth in Baton Rouge makes it almost impossible to use Google Maps/Earth effectively.
MS Live, as much as it pains me to say, it much better.
Makes you install and updater (not just as a constantly running Service but also as a DRIVER?!! WTF!)
:)
then it also sets google as default search engine and installs google toolbar.... can this be any more EVIL?
Luckily i have a VMware 'crapware' virtual machine... this got installed on there, once done, i just copied the Google Earth folder to my real machine, GE 4.3 Beta without the *unnecessary* crap
Is it just me, or are the new controls really very confusing? The older slider for determining angle of view has now been replaced by the up/down controls on the 'eyeball wheel', but you can no-longer adjust that angle very quickly . There's the new fancy-schancy 'dive from a great height to the ground' slider, overall I feel pretty lost.
The demo "comes in for a landing" on a San Francisco street. The building imagery is texture-mapped onto the building volume models but the profiles of the cars are texture-mapped onto the ground.
Result: The cars are all "squashed flat" onto the street. Reduced to a layer of paint. Steel road-kill.
A great Earth Day gift for the eco-freaks of San Francisco. B-)
(And I bet Critical Mass members are grinning as well.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've always thought the GIS-style stuff on the Internet is one of the most impressive uses of technology... like, if I were to show my grandma, or an alien, what technology were capable of, Google Earth would probably be the first thing I'd go for. Visually and conceptually stunning, and useful into the bargain.
I remember being amazed by Google Maps, then shortly after spending literally half a day exploring Keyhole (which then became Google Earth), and more recently Google Street View, then Live Maps' Birds-Eye view (well worth checking out), and now this.
Admittedly coverage of 3D buildings is a little thin on the ground right now, but the well done ones are incredibly impressive. Now for the question:
I understand how some of them are done in SketchUp, using basic textures and clever modelling, but I'm really interested in how the actual photo-realistic ones are captured. As an example, search for "Marshalls Mill, Leeds, UK".
The buildings are captured in amazingly high resolution (to the point where you can read the To Let sign on the side), and it's obviously not just a repeated texture. How do they capture these photos? My best guess is a lot of photos from ground level, later stitched and perspective corrected, but I'd be fascinated to hear from someone who knows more.
Most impressive anyway. I love Google Earth.
...they already have both sets of images, and they're not short on disk space, why not simply have a toggle in Google Earth that allows you to select between "best resolution" and "most recent image"? A version numbering system would be even better, as it would allow you to use Google Earth to track changes in a place, but I suspect that even Google would have problems with the storage requirements for that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Because of the angle of the angle of the sun, the photos of the hills near my apartment are shaded on one side. The sunrise and sunset feature, coupled with terrain view makes it possible to get an idea of what time of day/year similar images were taken.
;)
Not that it helps me, but I'm sure someone has wanted to know for one reason or another
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Yeah, it's nice. But today most of the letters in "Pennsylvania" vanished. Then all the state and place labels went away. What is that big red dot in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania?
How fricking hard could it be to support gpsd?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Went from 4.2 to 4.3 and now New York buildings locks up the whole program.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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Check out the shit they're doing with San Francisco. Utterly amazing, those buildings. We're in the scifi future, I just need to get my particle beam targeting software tied in here.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Is it just me or did the street and locality names disappear with the upgrade from 4.2 beta to 4.3?
Google coordinates for your neighborhood? Thanks, Jim
Ok, I'm late on that one. But really worth is the GEB 6-minutes video demonstration of the new features.
Here's more info, well, a copy of my post of the site from my sig:
Mentioned earlier this week, here's the official announcement and a description of a new feature, 3D building swooping. The release provoked a lot of reactions and writings in the geoblogs. Here's the GEB entries on his first impressions [with screenshots], a video demonstration, well worth the 6 minutes (really), a short explanation of the new navigation widgets and some final thoughts on GE 4.3. Ogle Earth also shares his comments and discuss the differences between atlases and mirror worlds. Interesting to note that not everyone is pleased with some of the changes, with GE being dubbed the AOL of the Geoweb. APB also links to a IW article on the practical uses of Google StreetView.
Animoog.org
The shadow feature is brilliant but 3D. I like the new shadow feature. In the tour video of this new version we can see how this works in Switzerland Mountains. I found that pretty impressive but it lacks original images. It shows 3d image for that.
Teleports you where ever you click!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
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Building a kennel doesn't make you a dog.
Or if you're a fan of the ubiquitous car analogy, "Building a garage doesn't make you a car."
I had to downgrade to old version of google earth because v4 wouldn't import GPX track logs, has anyone been able to see if this bug has been fixed in the new release?
I get the track logs because I use a tomtom GO (linux based!) and a 3rd party tracker application which uses the tomtom SDK/API - see http://www.opentom.org/Event_Logger
This is all well and good, but I can't sem to find the base building menu, and I can't launch any Interceptor or Skyranger craft. Luckily there haven't been any sightings or Terror Sites yet, but I don't know how long this'll be.
Funnily, remote areas in western Colombia and other parts are notoriously cloudy... Maybe someone dropped a horse head in someone's bed.
Take for instance the following :
... see Florida's coasts, all around the Mexican Gulf, or (to stay around the supposedly more enhanced pictures nearby USA), the carribeans ...
... Mexico's filled with them (nope, they're not lakes, as lakes & stuff have some shades or whatever is their primary color. Here, every single pixel's the exact same color than his neighbour ..
...
... where nothing's supposed to be there, so a big whitey zone is all that's available to see ...
... if they're not there, what is the point of hiding them ?
- Rama bridge (between Sri Lanka & India), nearly all blocked by blurred clouds
- Everything bordering sea
- White / Black blobs
- And the list goes on and on
- Of course, the infamous Area 51
Since not *all* or those are where the US military is expected to visit some day, What the fsck is happening here ?
Pyramids remains, ancient buildings, sunken cities where what I looked for (especially around Mexico and inside the little islands around the Gulf of the same familly)
By the way, does anyone know of a reliable web site where I could find some (non-blurred) aerial/satellite pics of the Rama Bridge ?
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The decrease in resolution is the failure of a common GIS mentality - The term "Latest and Greatest" is used to the point of being a beaten dead horse cliche. The failure of this mentality is that it assumes that the newest version of data is Always the best version to use.
I found that the performance of 4.3 vs 4.2 was terrible, until I turned atmosphere off (View > Atmosphere).
Atmosphere was never a problem in 4.2, but I guess this is something to do with the new day/night features.