Take a trip

I must have read on a dozen blogs about how cool Google Earth is. It's all true. Google Earth is damn cool. Downloads of the necessary software were blocked for a while, but have now been reopened. I installed it yesterday and have spent a couple hours playing around with it. It's impressive that they've started filling in the international locations. When I discovered Google Maps six months ago, most of the hi-res locations were in North America. Now major cities all over the world have been added -- such as Buenos Aires. Here's a view of the Recoleta Cemetary I visited last month:

Google Earth aims to give you a real 3D view of the world. You can zoom in and zoom out of any location, but also change the pitch and direction of your view. It's crude now, but you can start to get the sense of where they're going with this project. Google aims to create a database that contains a complete 3D image of the world. Cities like New York now have buildings mapped in:

They're just grey blocks now, but you can virtually roll down the streets and get a sense of where you are. Someday the buildings will be 'skinned' correctly, and if we have a pipe fat enough to receive the data and a computer powerful enough to display it, we'll have a virtual New York on our desktops. And a virtual London, Paris, Tokyo, Baghdad, Buenos Aires, Toronto and Ottawa too.

Way cool.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at July 8, 2005 12:58 PM | TrackBack