Alan Glennon at Geography 2.0 has a very interesting article up about Microsoft’s plans regarding their response to Google Earth. Among other things, he points to this posting in Microsoft’s job announcement pages, from back in October 2005:
Have you seen Google Earth? Good concept, bad implementation. We have started a whole new project that takes the Flight Simulation 3D engine, builds Virtual Earth scenarios on it and merges it with our daily easy to use Streets and Trips product. Together this becomes our brand new built-from‘¯Ω-the-ground-up Virtual Earth desktop product. We are looking for a PM to join this effort.
Alan also has some insightful ideas about how Google in turn might respond, and where Google Earth could improve. Might Google buy a gaming company? It’s worth reading the whole piece.
The Guardian’s John Lanchester, doesn’t get Google Earth. In a review of Google’s offerings, he writes:
Google Earth isn’t particularly useful, but it is brutally cool: you begin with a satellite view and gradually descend to earth, homing in with a level of detail that can give you a view of your own house (also, it turns out, of secret military installations).
Lanchester obviously uses Google Earth only for the eyecandy. But he should at least have remembered these two particular cases were Google Earth was particularly useful in just the past six months: Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan Quake. And don’t get me started on the versatility of the network link and the boon this program is for geographic literacy in schools. It’s Lanchester who isn’t being particularly useful to his readers in this instance.
Regarding Google’s much lamented decision to self-censor its Chinese language search service inside China: I don’t disapprove in principle, but I do believe it is a terrible decision on practical grounds, because it sets a bad precedent that could affect Google Earth’s user experience down the line.
Here are two reasons why I don’t have a moral problem with Google censoring results on behalf of the Chinese government:
1) The plain-vanilla English-language Google search service continues to be available to all in China, uncensored by Google but with “subversive” outbound links blocked by China. So choose your poison.
On the forums at AVSIM, a flight simulator afficionado site, somebody has posted a side-by-side comparison of the same view of Seattle in Google Earth and in Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The FSX view looks much better — but much of it is fake.
Ed Parsons muses about the larger implications of the “Australian flying car” meme that propagated throught the internet over the past week.
Grasshoppermind notes the existence of digital cameras with built-in GPS, but wants to know — where are the video cameras with built-in GPS?
Google Earth Blog points the way to a site with interesting data on the Antarctic region, packaged as a network link. You can use it to find the current position of larger icebergs, the extent of the sea ice, the location of bases, and more.
Both this site and the one for the Arctic blogged previously are linked to Polar View, a project sponsored by ESA. All this is pretty much a dress rehearsal for what’s coming: Next year is International Polar Year, and we can expect many more such outreach programs.
(One obvious item on the wishlist: Upgrading the image detail in Google Earth of the polar regions. There is plenty of raw source material, but last time I tried turning these into overlays I ran into positioning conflicts, as we are getting rather close to the poles, which are a sort of singularity in the reference system Google Earth uses.)
This is precious, if geeky: Developers at Eyebeam have come up with a way of capturing 3D objects from mainstream 3D Windows applications (like Half Life and World of Warcraft) and then reusing these data objects, either in Google Earth, 3D printers, or in 3D manipulation applications like Maya. The software package that does this is called OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) and the website highlighting the technology likens the process to making a 3D screen grab.
Visit the site and you’ll find a Second Life avatar transposed onto Google Earth’s Manhattan San Francisco(?), where it is playing Godzilla.
It can only be a matter of weeks (?) before somebody ports King Kong’s likeness to Google Earth’s Empire State Building as a KML file. Right?
(Oh, and somebody was wondering if there is a way of capturing objects from Google Earth’s own 3D buildings layer. The answer to that turns out to be Yes.)
Visit the site and you’ll find a