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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.
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".
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.
One could use this for planning of landscape photography and how and where the setting sun will be.
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
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