Across the land and over the sea

A couple of weeks ago i gave in to all the hype and downloaded Google Earth. Now not many things blow me away these days, but WOW! The program allows you to take a bird eye's view of the world, or should i say a moon's eye? You can navigate to anywhere you like and it will display a recent (last 2 years) overhead picture. Often this will be a fairly low resolution, however if you're lucky you may see a high resolution image. When i zoomed in on our office building in Alexandria, i was amazed when i was able to distinguish the cars parked on the roof of our office building! On Saturday i spent half an hour with Cheryl and Kerri, trying to locate the Athletics Stadium in Helsinki. Cheryl was able to recognise the course for her World Championship Walk event.

The most impressive thing about the program is the look and feel of it. If you enter a city into the search field, the view will slowly pan across the earth, zooming out then in as it goes. You can drag the view around to see the surrounding area's, zoom in to a suburban block, or zoom out to see the entire planet, all the while doing it very smoothly with realtime streaming. It can even show terrain - if you take yourself into the mountains, you can shift your view to see a ground-eye's view. Once they update the database with more high resolution images (Sydney CBD is very low res), you will wonder how you ever lived without this tool. No more maps split between pages - just move the location to the middle of the screen and press print.

I wonder how far this will go? If we get to the point where we can see a real-time image, we will run into privacy issues. Anyhow, if you have broadband and a fast PC, you really must give Google Earth a try.