I mentioned this over the 4th of July weekend, but it deserves an official debut.
I probably couldn't sum it up any better than what's on the home page:
This is actually kind of an amazing program. It's a perfect example of how great it is to be living in the digital age. I would say it's almost as revolutionary as VCRs were in their day, in the sense that both ideas would have been completely inconceivable just a few years before. What, little ol' you, actually tape a live TV show? Impossible! What, little ol' you, actually fly around the globe in your own private spy plane and then zoom in on your neighbor's back yard while she's secretly nude sunbathing??
Amazing, is the only word.
Not to mislead you, though. These are zoomed-in images you're looking at. The live streaming video version is still a few years away.
And here's why the site is different:
While there are a number of Google Earth tours on YouTube and the like, I found every single one of them to have five major flaws:
1. The quality of the video is always atrocious. This is primarily because people are impatient, lazy and/or dumb and they're using the default recording levels rather than the time-consuming better levels.
2. The tours usually stop at each spot for an whopping 1.7 seconds — just long enough for us to barely get an idea of what we're looking at — before dashing off to the next spot. Why? Because 1.7 seconds is the default setting and they simply couldn't be bothered to, you know, actually look at any of the options.
3. No thought is given to the display order, so you end up bouncing all over the globe, again and again and again. Granted, it's a great effect, but it wears a little thin after the 45th time.
4. It appears to be federal law that every Google Earth tour on YouTube must be accompanied by some of the worst music in the universe.
5. Alien crop circles. Ancient astronaut geoglyphs. UFO landing sites. That pretty much says it all.
This project is going to correct all five of these pesky little problems.
The download link for Google Earth and some important setup tips are on the site. It's a quick install.
While most articles about Google Earth focus on the intriguing spots around the globe, another big feature is how much it can do in real-time. You can track airline flights, including their exact location, speed, altitude; the whole schmear. Ditto big boat cruise lines. It also has real-time satellite weather, moon phases, tides, all kinds of things.
And, perhaps most importantly, there's a global warming catastrophic climate change program where you can track how a certain area of ocean just off Fiji has risen .217 degrees in the last 10 years, while a spot in the Bering sea has dropped .131 degrees, thereby proving the U.N. climate scientists were correct when they spoke of wild fluctuations in our global weather patterns thanks to your SUV. Nice go, buddy. Way to destroy the planet and everything.
As for the video tours on the site, I'd suggest you watch a couple of normal ones first, just to get the idea, then watch the 'Goofs' tour at some point. It's hysterical. Also, check out some of the Specialty Tours to get an idea of what can be done with the add-ons. The '34 Moons' is kinda neat, as is 'Earth Lights' (when they speak of "darkest Africa", here's what they meant), and the 'Space Stuff' (all of the space debris and satellites circling the earth) is pretty sobering. The 'High Resolution' spots are semi-amazing for their clarity, and the '3-D Terrain' tour is pretty cool. Want to fly down the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley? Google Earth is your ticket.
Introducing: The Google Earth Project
