Google Earth In 4D

[engine]

Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today.

Google Earth In 4D [blogs.zdnet.com]

[LifeinAsia]

Google skipped right past the third dimension

Um, the 3D effects of Google Earth are what has made it such a hit. The guy's supposedly a professional writer and couldn't figure out that Google had 3 dimensions from the begining?

[mcavic]

Well, it's only a 3D presentation of a 2D image. But yes, they are nice effects.

Neat about the historical maps, but they don't really interest me. I'd like to see historical satellite images. ;)

[laertes]

Well, it's only a 3D presentation of a 2D image

Don't you mean it's 2D rep of a 3D image? Virtual 3D, as all computer screen representations of 3 dimension are. Furthermore, that still only makes 3 dimensions- width, length and time.

[Hollywood]

4th Dimension is actually known as a hypercube.

[traipse.com...]

And the idea of historical maps is dull on my end as well, would much rather use regular sources for history.

Yawn...

Hollywood

[edited by: encyclo at 6:07 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2006]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[httpwebwitch]

2D rep of a 3D image

Google Earth Classic is a 2D projection of a 3D object which is a transformation of a 2D image onto a 3D surface.

Counting all the "D"s in that sentence, I'd reckon this new Google Earth is in 2.75D

[crobb305]

You think we ever be able to select high-res satellite imagery from an archive (chose an image date/time) or even view live images? This may have security/privacy ramifications, so I have always wondered if that day will come. Would be interesting though, to travel back in time to before your house was built and see what was there, etc (from satellite, not a digitized map).

[httpwebwitch]

Maybe Google could buy my time machine technology. Until now I've only been using it to get extra sleep.

When I first showed Google Earth to a coworker we zoomed in on our office building. her first response was "hey - go outside and wave!"

I'm still not sure if she was joking

[romaniucc]

Historical is nice, although I wish I'd see old satelite maps most

[httpwebwitch]

I think it would be scary to watch a time-lapse aerial view of deforestation, urban sprawl, melting icecaps. I'd like to see that on Google Earth even if it's simulated.

Having done something similar myself, I know how difficult it can be to overlay a historical map [webmasterworld.com] onto a satellite-perfect geographic image. Old maps were hand-drawn, often using unusual projections and grids. I overlaid about 300 maps onto Google Earth just to get approximate lat/long points for historical locations - and it took me most of the winter of 2005-2006. It was a fascinating project, though manually laborious.

[percentages]

>Historical is nice

Historical is all I can get!

Google Earth recently updated images of my area.....well they are now only 3 years out of date instead of 5!

The latter data/images are available....zillow.com has it...Google is plainly not on the ball with the present or future :(