Anyone ever used Google Earth?

[SirLemming]

I've got a Google Earth hangover right now.

Yes, I stayed up for over 3 hours last night using Google Earth to look at my house, my college, my old schools, Disney World, Six Flags Great Adventure, the abandoned property of Heritage USA, and more.

I don't know why, but it's a really bizarre and transcendent experience for me. I just couldn't stop. It's really freaky. It was all I could do to refrain from playing The Beatles' "In My Life" during the whole thing. All these old places, man... crazy. (Especially Heritage USA. That killed me. Haven't been there for at least 10 years and I certainly haven't been there since it was abandoned.) And Disney owns so much of Florida it's scary.


So anyone else tried this? It's somewhere at Google.com, obviously... It's a program you download (though it also uses the internet).



Oh, I forgot to describe it for the uninitiated. It's a photographic satellite view of the entire world. In most places, you can zoom in enough to see a car but not enough to see what kind of car it is. It's not real-time or anything, of course. A building that was built at my college in Spring 2004 is still not on there.

[Phantasm]

Google Earth is the BEST!

Its like holding the whole world at the palm of my hand...AMAZING!:D

[Zubby]

Yeah, I'm addicted to it as well. Have you tried tilting the image to see the topography? It doesn't work well in all areas, but if you go to a hilly place, like the Rocky Mountains or San Francisco, you can tilt the view and actually see the hills and how they fit in to the landscape. It's really cool.

[Tash]

You can see anywhere in the world? Technology has become scary. It's only a matter of time before we can use Google Spy Satalite to spy on people anywhere in the world.

[solarflere]

Ever since Google has aquired the Keyhole company, it is now in possesion of the most advanced mapping technology there is. I use Google Earth every time I need (driving) directions, every time I am tracking a flight of a family member, every time I deed to find an address, and every time I want to look at the roof of my house.:p

[KillerPenguin]

It's entertainment for when I'm bored.

[Mek]

I didn't know that they had something like that. Interesting.

Well, I find it hard to revisit older stuff, so I might not be using it for a while.

How does it work, anyways?

[SirLemming]

Do you mean the inner workings of it or just how to use it?

I'll try to answer both. What you get on the screen is a 3D (polygonal) globe with satellite photography as the textures. Of course, from far away, it doesn't completely render all the textures, because that would take FOREVER to load. But you rotate the globe with the mouse (which, when you're zoomed in enough, looks like typical scrolling), and when you zoom in, the texturing gets clearer and clearer. You can also adjust the viewing angle so that you get sort of a horizon line. It's overhead view by default.

So basically it's a globe... a really really detailed globe.

I think it streams the satellite photos from some sort of online source.