Google Earth Is Amazing!
hi,
On the recommendation of a friend, I've just been trying out Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/). It's a zoomable, rotatable, photographic atlas of the whole world.
I just downloaded it and somehow 90 minutes disappeared: a visit to Ipswich, a nostalgic trip around the Princeton campus, finding a friend's address in New York (NYC even has 3D buildings you can superimpose on the aerial photographs), popping over to Melbourne, going back to visit places in China - a great view of the forbidden city that gave a much better impression of it than the maps I saw there - over to the mountains in Western Sichuan (rendered fantastically in 3D), a trip to downtown Baghdad to see the presidential palace, and a little sightseeing in London (after popping to Brighton and Oxford).
OK, it's not all at a great resolution, only some cities have really high resolution pictures (more in the US, as expected) but the point is it is all there, and to appreciate stunning mountains in New Zealand or China, you don't need enough resolution to see a particular house. Flying across the Australian interior with lakes, rivers, deserts, and mountains was awesome. A trip West of Baghdad showed how the fields follow the rivers and after only a small distance from the water the rectangles of green give way to the sandy desert.
A little warning if you're tempted to use it (aside of much lost time) it could be very slow to use. I'm on an extremely fast internet connection in the University and it was downloading the whole time and I often had to wait a little while before the crispest photographs appeared. Still, if you have the capacity for the 10MB download and much much more downloading as you browse - give it a go!
Well now it's after my bedtime, so I'm off.
Cheers,
Ali
On the recommendation of a friend, I've just been trying out Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/). It's a zoomable, rotatable, photographic atlas of the whole world.
I just downloaded it and somehow 90 minutes disappeared: a visit to Ipswich, a nostalgic trip around the Princeton campus, finding a friend's address in New York (NYC even has 3D buildings you can superimpose on the aerial photographs), popping over to Melbourne, going back to visit places in China - a great view of the forbidden city that gave a much better impression of it than the maps I saw there - over to the mountains in Western Sichuan (rendered fantastically in 3D), a trip to downtown Baghdad to see the presidential palace, and a little sightseeing in London (after popping to Brighton and Oxford).
OK, it's not all at a great resolution, only some cities have really high resolution pictures (more in the US, as expected) but the point is it is all there, and to appreciate stunning mountains in New Zealand or China, you don't need enough resolution to see a particular house. Flying across the Australian interior with lakes, rivers, deserts, and mountains was awesome. A trip West of Baghdad showed how the fields follow the rivers and after only a small distance from the water the rectangles of green give way to the sandy desert.
A little warning if you're tempted to use it (aside of much lost time) it could be very slow to use. I'm on an extremely fast internet connection in the University and it was downloading the whole time and I often had to wait a little while before the crispest photographs appeared. Still, if you have the capacity for the 10MB download and much much more downloading as you browse - give it a go!
Well now it's after my bedtime, so I'm off.
Cheers,
Ali
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