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Google the Entire Earth
Google Earth allows you to look at the entire planet in medium-high resolution goodness, complete with 3D rotation and attitude control - whether you're 20 feet or 2000 miles off the ground. You can toggle features such as true 3D buildings (38 US cities for now) and terrain, and a "Layers" option can show a plethora of notable locations such as major retail outlets, churches, volcanoes and even golf courses. Driving directions? Don't even get me started. Find out more after the jump.
Sure, you can enter your route, place your own annotations and see every step of the way in 3D grandeur that rivals even their own Maps. But the sweet part is that you can hit a "Play" button and get a 100% fly-through of the entire route. Drool.
Images, maps and routes are printable, but if you want anything better than a standard screenshot you have to upgrade to Plus or Pro. Plus offers GPS device support, better printing and drawing tools, while Pro brings presentation and collaboration features for professional and commercial uses.
Presently Google Earth is only available for Windows, although their site says a Mac version is coming. Lastly, as of this writing the service is still "taking a breather", but I'm sure it'll be back up soon.
Comments
11
Subscribe to commentsJordan RunningJun 29th 2005 11:48PM
Google seems to have taken the download page offline, replacing it with a message that says, "Thanks for your interest in Google Earth, but we're sorry we can't offer you a download right now. As you know, Google Earth is in beta, and we're still building out our ability to take on new users." The Google cache of the page still works and the download is still available, but after I installed it it wouldn't connect to the server. Perhaps they're overloaded?
Sam KimJun 30th 2005 12:36AM
Something I haven't seen mentioned anywhere... The Google Earth app has a web browser capability built in - and it's not Firefox. It uses Internet Explorer. Technically, I think this is the launch of Google's first web browser. This was much anticipated, but no one noticed.
Sauce1985Jun 30th 2005 3:21AM
Not gonna lie, the addition of Smoots as a measurement was a stroke of genius. The story behind it was worth taking the time to find out WTF a smoot was.
I <3 Geeks!
OrkOJun 30th 2005 5:36AM
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ is better
RichardJun 30th 2005 6:57AM
Re #2. Microsoft make it very easy to embed and control the rendering portion of IE (not all the browsing functionality) into other applications and this is what Google has done.
The reason they have used IE is because there is no current way to do this with Firefox.
Jordan RunningJun 30th 2005 10:13AM
Richard, you're mistaken. You can use the Gecko SDK to embed Gecko (the rendering engine used by Mozilla, Firefox, and Camino) in any application. Read about it on the Embedding Mozilla page.
JohnJun 30th 2005 10:46AM
I managed to download the 10 Mb installer application but it doesn't do anything. I double click on it and nothing happens.
As for the Smoots, I covered those 364 smoots + one ear (if I remember correctly) many times.
R-BroJun 30th 2005 3:54PM
The linked download is for Google Plus, which I believe requires an account. Perhaps that's why it won't connect? Man, I am really eager to check this out, too.
RandyJul 1st 2005 3:48PM
I wonder how this will stack up to Virtual Earth (http://www.virtualearth.com)
Neil SabharwalJul 4th 2005 4:32PM
you cant download google earth no more but i got it off bittorrent
davinderDec 22nd 2005 4:31AM
i want to download google