Has anyone seen this !!! Its awesome!!!
 

http://earth.google.com/

Its a moveable 3d map of the earth .. but done with the highest available satellite pictures.

Some areas (Mainly Europe and the States) are so detailed that I can see my own cars parked on my house !!! Its about 1m/pixel

Even Africa.. Its done at a fairly resolution of around 10m/pixel .. i.e. in Nouaddibou you can SEE ! the track for the train !!

IT lets you record your own database of points .. and It surprisingly's got already a good amount of tracks (i.e. the parc' route its already there ,marked as a route).

Even better , Its got also some GPS support , which -supossedly- lets you update in real time the satellite picture overhead you.

The only drawback I see is that earth data can not be cached (i.e. It need to hava full-time Internet connection to work ) But surely that will be fixed also .

Enjoy.

Javier Carrion

I have to agree. It's remarkable stuff. I don't think they'll be moving away from the streaming media though. One of their products that they're selling is the database server, if you could just download all the data then there's no incentive to buy.

It's absolutely fantastic for visualising your route and seeing what an area's like. I can't recommend highly enough.

Agree! Fantastic piece of software! Only downside you need to be a Microsoft user (Windows) and you need a broadband internet connection.

Here's a few examles what you can do/see:

Brunny Island, Tasmania:
http://www.ryd.ch/images/BrunnyIsland.jpg

Tamanrasset, looking north:
http://www.ryd.ch/images/Tamanrasset.jpg

Ulanbaatar, looking at the airport from the hills south of the city:
http://www.ryd.ch/images/Ulaanbaatar.jpg

Hires pics of Gibraltar and La Linea from the north:
http://www.ryd.ch/images/Gibraltar.jpg

Maybe also worth mentioning that the software is not an invitation of Google but they bought it from Keyhole Corp. What I love the most is that you can save views (global position and camera postion/view) and share that with other users, there is even a whole community: http://bbs.keyhole.com

But be carefull, it's addictive http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/ubb/smile.gif

Cheers, Kudi

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Ride Your Dreams

Any one paid up for Earth Plus and used it with their GPS? At the moment payments are suspended but fully intend to try this when available.

IMHO it's pretty useless to use Google Earth with your GPS, the only thing this would do is to show your current postion in the application - Javier, it does not show realtime pictures - and that is useless because you would need a broadband connection to the internet while on the road.

As Javier already mentioned, the cache size is limited to 512MB and there is no option to cache certain areas of the world for your journey. I do not think this will be fixed, pretty shure that is an intention, at the end Google is only a commercial company having the intersset to bind their customers.

Another very simillar software is NASA Worldwind (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov), it's in a very early stage but has simillar capatibilities as Google Earth, it offers the capatibility to have you data localy stored and, most important, it is opensource. I'm shure there will be loads of activity in the opensource community in the near future. For now, Google Earth is the better sollution because it has better quality pictures (Landsat 7 in best quality and the hires pics) and has a few killer features Worldwind does not offer - yet...

Even so, still a brilliant piece of software!

Cheers, Kudi