Apple Maps used to do this too. They took it away a few versions ago for reasons I don’t quite understand. I really liked the “Pale Blue Dot”-like overview of the Earth when zoomed out all the way.
Given the behavior of the poles (they're not viewable; the south is also a black hole…), I suspect that there's a very smoothly done transition to web mercator for the higher zoom levels.
The eyes see a 2-dimensional picture. Computer displays produce a 2-dimensional picture. There is no such thing as a “3D map” on a standard computer display. Only an orthographic (or maybe perspective) projection which animates in response to user input.
In general an orthographic projection is a poor choice. The thing going for it is that it is easy to understand by analogy to a physical globe, and human spatial understanding can partially compensate for the distortion by imagining a sphere.
But there are also disadvantages, for example on an orthographic projection north is not always vertical, latitude and longitude lines are neither perpendicular nor straight, shapes and areas can be very dramatically distorted near the edge of the map, there are dramatic distance errors between far away points or points not in the center of view, it is impossible to view more than half of the planet’s surface in one view, etc.
There are many other choices of map projections, and for any particular purpose, some other projection is usually better.
Regardless of what the eye sees, the brain perceives three dimensions. This projection happens to be the one that the brain can automatically unpack into an accurate 3D representation. Technically, things near the edges are squished and distorted, but that gets undone in the wetware.
You really can’t get an accurate sense of angles/shapes, areas, distances, or directions with an orthographic projection except by moving the view around. Even when you do, it is very difficult to accurately compare attributes of regions which are far away on the globe, and easy to mislead yourself. (This is a problem with physical globes as well.)
For many types of mapping use cases, orthographic projections are substantially worse than other possible choices.
Sometimes physical spheres (or virtual representations of spheres as dynamic orthographic or perspective projections) are nice. That’s why I spent a whole bunch of time building myself a spherical chalkboard, for example. But they aren’t the best choice for any purpose. Personally I don’t think they make a very good choice for a general-purpose world map. They are better as a supplement to flat maps.
This is not a good projection to use if you want to see all of North America. There is dramatically more distortion than necessary, and shapes near the edges get very squished (the west coast of the US is okay), but it is not at all obvious to a naïve viewer what kind of distortions are involved, and past experience looking at soccer balls or whatever isn’t going to fix it.
(Note: a Mercator projection is also not a good choice for this. On a Mercator projection sizes are dramatically bloated as you go north.)
I'm not convinced it isn't still the best option. The naive viewer may not properly perceive the distortions, but I bet they'll get closer than with anything else, for general purposes.
What projection would you say would be good for that view?
For North America per se you could e.g. pick the conformal projection with roughly constant scale around the boundary of the continent (one world atlas does this), or you could pick a projection which minimized distance errors (there are several possible ways of quantifying those, which will yield different maps), or you could pick among several equal-area projections (especially useful if you want to make a choropleth map), or for something dynamic you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection or some conic projection (e.g. Lambert conformal conic, Albers equal-area conic), or .... https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395
There are many choices. An orthographic projection is generally one of the worst except insofar as it gives the impression of a physical sphere when you zoom all the way out.
You can, of course, use VR to get a stereoscopic 3D display as well, like what humans see in the real world. Except for depth of field (which some prototype VR systems can still accomplish), that's as 3D as real life. And Google Maps/Earth VR can indeed do that.
I'm amazed this has been downvoted so much... As the OP stated, "globe" view (a.k.a. orothographic or perspective, depending) is not fundamentally better than other projections. It has tradeoffs. You should always choose the projection that matches your use case.
A map is a visualization tool. The goal is not to reflect reality as accurately as possible. The goal is to communicate data and spatial relationships. Projections are part of that. There is not a "best" projection. Orthographic with some animations is a nice visual tool for some purposes and terrible for others.
How could pointing this out be controversial? A bar graph is not a perfect representation of a group of numbers, but it's a very useful visualization. A map is no different than any other visualization.
the author of TFA probably thought the desire for correct shape in a map is implied and wasn’t trying to defend against map pedantry. of what use is a map if the shapes are wrong?
One of the revolutions in the first Underground/Subway/Metro maps was that by throwing away the actual shapes, it is able to represent the stations and the relationships between them far clearer than otherwise.
a subway map has little to do with a geographic map. only the nodes and time traveled between them matter. the shape of the actual routes is immaterial.
The Gall–Peters projection is a rectangular map projection that maps all areas such that they have the correct sizes relative to each other. Like any equal-area projection, it achieves this goal by distorting most shapes.
For rollouts like this, a small holdback experiment is typical, to assess long term trends. Or maybe your browser doesn't have hardware acceleration enabled? Or you could be in canvas mode?
Try ?force=webgl on the end of the maps url in case it's the latter.
Try shadertoy.com to see if webgl is available.
>On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale.
This isn't right. It is impossible to represent both relative position and relative size accurately. Gall-Peters and other equal-area projections accurately represent relative sizes.
There are cartographically reasonable equal-area or nearly-equal-area projections. Why are we still talking about Gall-Peters?
Peters was a charlatan who knew very little geography (he didn't even want to give credit to the geographer who discovered his map), and the Gall-Peters projection is Mercator for old-school hippies who think they can promote equality by making Africa taller.
Here's a couple views on Peters and his map projection.
An article from "The Map Room" [1] on the argument about Boston public schools having adopted that map, which really dominates Google results right now I guess, but even within the lens of that topic it hits the major points.
And here's a "New Internationalist" article about Arno Peters [2] -- it sounds like he was fine as a historian, and I even agree with his motivation for not wanting to plot historical events on a Mercator map, but it sure would have been great if he had learned about the equal-area alternatives to Mercator that Gall and Mollweide and Eckert and other geographers had already made.
It's not that I'm against making a map projection to "question Western imperalism". I take more issue with Peters' questioning of basic geometry -- he claimed his map preserves angles, which is clearly false (imagine a NW-SE road meeting a NE-SW road in Ecuador and what that right angle would look like in Gall-Peters), and he claimed that it was the "only" equal-area projection.
And I don't think it actually advances the conversation about equality to make a map that looks right in Europe and stretches Africa and South America like taffy.
This is an unfinished demo from a while back, but I made vector and raster map tiles in a WGS84 projection, so McMurdo is included — though you have to find it yourself [1]
I'm unlikely to work on the globe, it's cool[2] but we don't really need it. Maybe when OpenLayers Cesium[3] gets support for vector tiles, so we don't have to see fuzzy, distorted raster tiles.
I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.
Do we really think very much is really affected by map projections?
Korea looms large in people's imaginations for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with its occupied land mass size, and a lot to do with their history and cultural and economic power.
If Korea is not occupied by the U.S. and allowed to unite then it would take a decade or so before their economy would be number two in the world with them kind of needing to be on the U.N. Security Council.
The same can't be said about if Sudan was united again, Sudan would not be magically punching above India, Russia and Germany in international commerce.
The world where we see the world as it is, a sphere that we can interact with and with that sphere being the default view has been a long time coming. We will look back and wonder why we got the perspective wrong for so long. There are no other objects we display in Mercator Projection et al.
If we could go back in time with what the fine people at Google have achieved and give it to navigators of the past, in the days before aeroplanes got popular, then all the hacks that 'demand Mercator' would never have arisen. Maybe we would have to teleport GPS back to this fictional past too.
The none-sphere maps make as much sense as those paintings done before perspective was worked out, we have just ended up believing them out of familiarity and due to the navigation and other hacks devised for the atlas makers of the past.
As recently as twenty years ago the idea of just showing the earth as a sphere for things like weather broadcasting would have seemed a radical and controversial idea. Thanks to Google and de-facto Maps we have made a small but important evolutionary leap in understanding our world.
Honestly, I doubt there will be any long-term geopolitical consequences. It's comforting to imagine that we can change the world just by more correctly representing a map, but I suspect the reality is that we can't.
Australian maps are shown with Oz in the middle, and the pacific / indian oceas each side, with South East Asia and Antarctia surrounding, exactly the same way US maps put the US in the center.
Do you mean whole-world maps have Australia in the center? (I assume so, since obviously a map of only Australia would have Australia as the center...)
That's fascinating! I grew up in the US and I'm not sure I've ever used a world map with the US in the center. Curious where you got this impression. I can find some examples if I specifically search online, but they look very weird to me.
Every world map I grew up with has the US on the far left, presumably due to the convenience of splitting the map on the Pacific Ocean. The first example that came to my mind: https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg
Maps in Japan have Japan and the Pacific ocean in the center and the Americas off to the right. Which make the phrases "the west" and "the east" kind of interesting choices.
A generation growing up on this will probably be less likely to believe in a flat earth, since the intuition will develop from the time they first start looking at maps.
I think it accomplishes the opposite of the intended political goal. Larger regions aren't more loved. Larger regions look more threatening. It is now far more obvious that people near the equator can't all migrate to the EU and US. The US and EU look much more vulnerable and precious.
Indeed, but this is no different from "north up in Northern hemisphere / south-up in Southern hemisphere" proposed above. Since we're talking interactive maps, you can probably just go by the center point (barycenter) of the viewport.
W/r/t Sun angles, things are pretty weird anywhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
The visualization is really cool but for daily use seems more practical being able to plot long trip routes without them disappearing on the back of the globe than being able to assess the true size of landmasses: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Madrid/Sydney,+New+South+Wal...
Unfortunately, the line drawing doesn't make this as cool as it could be. The line representing the flight from BOS to PEK is drawn due west, as would look natural on a 2D map. The real flight (and shortest route) heads north and passes near the north pole.
Hope they can update this, which would make international flights seem even more impressive than they already do.
Very cool! It's always seemed a shame to me that we stick with highly-inaccurate projections when we have the tech to do much better, simply out of inertia. Double-cheers as well for ignoring the weird convention that you shouldn't care about accurate sizing when looking a political rather than satalite map.
Very cool. However it's not using great circle routes for airline directions, for example ask to go from Calgary to London. It should go well over Greenland, but instead just follows the same path you'd get from drawing a line on a Mercator map.
Eastbound flights often take non-great circle routes in order to make better use of the jetstream - depending on the forecast, a straight eastward line may be more accurate than a great circle.
You can see the difference between Africa, Congo and Greenland as mentioned in the article: https://imgur.com/a/g7uIYGN
Greenland is the size of Congo, around 2,2 million km2 while entire Africa is around 30 million km2. Europe being around 10 and North America 24 million km2.
By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode:
Agreed, the images do seem lower quality than they used to be.
I was curious, though, and chose buildings at random around the Google office in NYC, just to do a side-by-side, and even the old pictures look better:
I'm assuming left is old and right is new? This looks like aerial photography shot from a plane rather than satellite imagery, which seems like it would depend more on the quality(?) of the plane than the quality of the cameras.
I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.
I think it's worth replying to this to reinforce the point that the new mode has technical disadvantages compared to the old mode. Some of my projects involve a great deal of time spent looking at aerial imagery, sometimes for hours a day, and while Google Maps is not the panacea of aerial images it is one of the best single sources in terms of usability and quality of images.
That said, prior to knowing this trick I was stuck with the effectively unmaintained Google Earth instead of the web view primarily because of the web maps insistence on the 3D rendering mode. The attempt to conform buildings and, most annoyingly, trees to the elevation data makes the imagery almost useless at close zoom levels, as all the actual detail disappears into clutter artificially introduced by the edges on the elevation data. It significantly reduces the amount of spatial resolution you can get out of areas where they have very good images.
Earth still has tools that web view doesn't have, but often I'm not even that interested in measurements and just want to be able to carefully inspect the image. This doesn't seem to be something Google wants to support any more!
My assumption had been that Google built these models using high-resolution LIDAR data, which is why I called it elevation... on a little more research though it looks like I was wrong and the models are perhaps constructed based on street view images and model data for other similar objects.
Honestly, I feel like this makes the situation even more indefensible, because I get that collecting high-quality DEM is very expensive and so trying to use it comes with a lot of compromises. But if they're just substituting in models of "similar trees" like one person on Quora suggests it seems almost embarrassing for them that they're making the user experience more frustrating in order to deliver a 3D street-level experience that's still so bad as to be useless.
It's more complicated than that. Among other things, it led to the open sourcing of Ceres: http://ceres-solver.org/users.html (a few clues on that page)
You definitely can't use Street View data alone for objects not at ground level. Actually, sometimes there is no Street View data for a place, at all. E.g. check the planes on the runways at airports like SFO, AUS and JFK. Incidentally, the varying quality at different airports is also a hint of how easy it is to fly over each of them at the ideal altitude(s) and how often one can get the necessary permits to refresh imagery.
A breath of fresh air, being able to visualise our place in the world as it truly is.
I think it's all fantastic, extremely fast, smooth, love the inertia on spin, the camera movement or simulation of is great, occlusion of objects nicely done.
Would like to see an example with clustering.
Is it possible to add elevation data ?
Is it possible to access this mode in the API to use the webgl version ?
This is actually slower in many cases. If you want to view 2D imagery and/or Mercator maps you can simply enable/disable Globe mode from the hamburger menu on the left.
So it's no longer a map application, because it's producing weird non-standard projections, tiles that can't be stitched/georeferenced properly etc.
Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application?
Or will they merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool purely for consumers to wow at?
Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.
It's gradually phased out. Right now it's essentially abandonware. At some point in the future they'll just kill it out of the blue. Things that provide value to advanced users don't matter to most of these "data-based" companies.
Perspective projection is not weird or non-standard. In some sense you could consider it the least weird projection, since it's what your eyes actually see when looking at a globe. But if you just can't get enough of Mercator, the option is still there in the hamburger menu (labeled "Globe").
Google Maps must be one of the modern wonders of the world, it's still nothing short of breathtaking to zoom out of streetview in crowded London and then land somewhere on a country crossroads in remote Vietnam.
And once you land on those country crossroads, you can continue exploring the area at the street level. It's really an incredible tool for sating wanderlust - just pop over to some place you've wanted to visit and wander the streets via streetview, all from the comfort of your seat!
Speaking of which, GeoGuessr [1] is a great example of how to enjoy Google Maps. You start at some random streetview and try to figure out where in the world you are by walking around (and hoping to see a sign or two)! A lot of times you end up in dirt roads in small countries, and it's really cool to see what it looks like there.
It'll be an interesting thing. They definitely understand the gaming angle due to Pokemon Go causing them to specially create tools and customize their API for gaming: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/gaming/
But that seems to be Enterprise level only.
They seem to have already updated for the new level. They also have advertisements and are a profitable business.
My guess is that they "Contacted Sales" like the Gaming API asks you to do and have a very agreeable discounted rate.
I've never seen a third party site using streetview so not much will be lost. But considering the effort and volume of data they have meticulously collected you can't blame them for monetizing it directly. Google is going to learn their lesson with the insane pricing on regular maps, though.
They could monetize it by putting ads on the maps/streetviews. They are an ad company after all, so they should have an option to show a map with ads for free, or without ads, but then it costs money.
I tried something similar to Google Earth in the late 90's at SIGGRAPH, running on an SGI Origin or similar. Was gobsmacked as I "parachuted" from orbit into Dodger Stadium. :D
I count with one hand all the technologies that have blown my mind: discovering the electronic parts of my toys, playing a NES game in my friend's PC, my first contact with the internet, the first iPhone. But discovering Google Earth was a really special one, suddenly I was able to explore every street in the world, I was able to look at my house (in a small city in a developing country). Then I started imagining all the possibilities, also my conspiracy side kicked in, I mean, I as a teenager with a Celeron PC was able to look at any place I wanted in the world, then what kind of secret technologies could a big government have?? Good old days, I hope technology will keep blowing my mind in the near future.
There was a guy on a TV documentary once that had worked for the government in some capacity. He was explaining that the satellite maps provided to the public are extremely zoomed out compared to what the government is able to see.
He said that the government had photography so detailed, that they could find a golf ball on a golf course, and even tell you what brand of golf ball it is.
TL;DR is that satellites have a 9 cm resolution at best. That's not enough to see a golf ball (4 cm diameter), and far away from discovering a producer's imprint on it.
With drones you can get an order of magnitude better, but that's still only barely enough to find said golf ball, and not enough to read fine print.
Thanks to this comment I just spent the last hour exploring Moscow, Tokyo, Kyoto, and the Dominican Republic. I feel like I've always taken street view for granted. But it is a truly incredible experience to drop into a city you've never been to and see things you wouldn't see even if you visited.
Granted, nothing compares to actually experiencing the culture and places in person, but street view makes for a completely different, incredible experience.
It is, i remember being captivated by this film in the (mid? late?) 90s.. (from the late 70s, pieced together by hand). Never imagined it would be (partly) possible in realtime.. some 10 years later.
(eagerly hanging out for orbit view milky way, but probably not in my lifetime)
Thanks for posting that - I was thinking about it the other day when I saw this[0] posted in another thread here. Great for sense of scale, but no "street view" in this one.
This was going to launch years ago with the vector rewrite, but it was only enabled for the globe mode (Earth/GL, complete with a simulation of the objects in the sky). Interesting timing.
It never was a flat map. That was just a kludge to make it work in the browser. The original application, from Keyhole, was 3D from 2003 or so. NVidia used to offer it as a promotion, before Google bought it.
Now it's a Chrome browser promotion. Google Earth requires Google's browser.
Just a note, they also changed how navigating works. It's almost as if the map curves differently at different zooms. The physics is very cool but it is a little nauseating. It is very realistic, almost like spinning a globe, but I'm not sure if its more preferable.
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[ 573 ms ] story [ 3862 ms ] threadAlso, is it just me or is zooming a bit broken at low zooms now? The globe drifts as I zoom.
Um, no it's not. TechCrunch needs better editors. You just need to use a non-Mercator projection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
Anyone who uses the Gall-Peters projection is a cop.
https://www.xkcd.com/977/
Given the behavior of the poles (they're not viewable; the south is also a black hole…), I suspect that there's a very smoothly done transition to web mercator for the higher zoom levels.
Can you imagine the distortion on a map of a small town located at the pole if Mercator was used?
Edit: better Dymaxion link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map It's made of triangles that you can rearrange, which isn't really shown in the xkcd.
You can if you don't mind having a non-rectangular map border.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
In general an orthographic projection is a poor choice. The thing going for it is that it is easy to understand by analogy to a physical globe, and human spatial understanding can partially compensate for the distortion by imagining a sphere.
But there are also disadvantages, for example on an orthographic projection north is not always vertical, latitude and longitude lines are neither perpendicular nor straight, shapes and areas can be very dramatically distorted near the edge of the map, there are dramatic distance errors between far away points or points not in the center of view, it is impossible to view more than half of the planet’s surface in one view, etc.
There are many other choices of map projections, and for any particular purpose, some other projection is usually better.
For many types of mapping use cases, orthographic projections are substantially worse than other possible choices.
Sometimes physical spheres (or virtual representations of spheres as dynamic orthographic or perspective projections) are nice. That’s why I spent a whole bunch of time building myself a spherical chalkboard, for example. But they aren’t the best choice for any purpose. Personally I don’t think they make a very good choice for a general-purpose world map. They are better as a supplement to flat maps.
Here is what North America looks like on this new map:
https://i.imgur.com/lCI8DjY.jpg
This is not a good projection to use if you want to see all of North America. There is dramatically more distortion than necessary, and shapes near the edges get very squished (the west coast of the US is okay), but it is not at all obvious to a naïve viewer what kind of distortions are involved, and past experience looking at soccer balls or whatever isn’t going to fix it.
(Note: a Mercator projection is also not a good choice for this. On a Mercator projection sizes are dramatically bloated as you go north.)
What projection would you say would be good for that view?
There are many choices. An orthographic projection is generally one of the worst except insofar as it gives the impression of a physical sphere when you zoom all the way out.
A map is a visualization tool. The goal is not to reflect reality as accurately as possible. The goal is to communicate data and spatial relationships. Projections are part of that. There is not a "best" projection. Orthographic with some animations is a nice visual tool for some purposes and terrible for others.
How could pointing this out be controversial? A bar graph is not a perfect representation of a group of numbers, but it's a very useful visualization. A map is no different than any other visualization.
The Gall–Peters projection is a rectangular map projection that maps all areas such that they have the correct sizes relative to each other. Like any equal-area projection, it achieves this goal by distorting most shapes.
checking maps on mobile which is on Canadian ISP, in chrome and the google maps android app, i can only see the "flat" map.
-ss
This isn't right. It is impossible to represent both relative position and relative size accurately. Gall-Peters and other equal-area projections accurately represent relative sizes.
Peters was a charlatan who knew very little geography (he didn't even want to give credit to the geographer who discovered his map), and the Gall-Peters projection is Mercator for old-school hippies who think they can promote equality by making Africa taller.
An article from "The Map Room" [1] on the argument about Boston public schools having adopted that map, which really dominates Google results right now I guess, but even within the lens of that topic it hits the major points.
And here's a "New Internationalist" article about Arno Peters [2] -- it sounds like he was fine as a historian, and I even agree with his motivation for not wanting to plot historical events on a Mercator map, but it sure would have been great if he had learned about the equal-area alternatives to Mercator that Gall and Mollweide and Eckert and other geographers had already made.
It's not that I'm against making a map projection to "question Western imperalism". I take more issue with Peters' questioning of basic geometry -- he claimed his map preserves angles, which is clearly false (imagine a NW-SE road meeting a NE-SW road in Ecuador and what that right angle would look like in Gall-Peters), and he claimed that it was the "only" equal-area projection.
And I don't think it actually advances the conversation about equality to make a map that looks right in Europe and stretches Africa and South America like taffy.
EDIT: left out the links
[1] https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is-fighti...
[2] https://newint.org/features/2003/01/05/arno/
I'm unlikely to work on the globe, it's cool[2] but we don't really need it. Maybe when OpenLayers Cesium[3] gets support for vector tiles, so we don't have to see fuzzy, distorted raster tiles.
[1] https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/temp-debug.html (click "Toggle" in the top right)
[2] https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/
[3] https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/
Upside down and mirrored should be simple though.
Korea looms large in people's imaginations for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with its occupied land mass size, and a lot to do with their history and cultural and economic power.
The same can't be said about if Sudan was united again, Sudan would not be magically punching above India, Russia and Germany in international commerce.
The world where we see the world as it is, a sphere that we can interact with and with that sphere being the default view has been a long time coming. We will look back and wonder why we got the perspective wrong for so long. There are no other objects we display in Mercator Projection et al.
If we could go back in time with what the fine people at Google have achieved and give it to navigators of the past, in the days before aeroplanes got popular, then all the hacks that 'demand Mercator' would never have arisen. Maybe we would have to teleport GPS back to this fictional past too.
The none-sphere maps make as much sense as those paintings done before perspective was worked out, we have just ended up believing them out of familiarity and due to the navigation and other hacks devised for the atlas makers of the past.
As recently as twenty years ago the idea of just showing the earth as a sphere for things like weather broadcasting would have seemed a radical and controversial idea. Thanks to Google and de-facto Maps we have made a small but important evolutionary leap in understanding our world.
That's fascinating! I grew up in the US and I'm not sure I've ever used a world map with the US in the center. Curious where you got this impression. I can find some examples if I specifically search online, but they look very weird to me.
Every world map I grew up with has the US on the far left, presumably due to the convenience of splitting the map on the Pacific Ocean. The first example that came to my mind: https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg
Example of a map poster for kids: http://happylilac.net/sekaitizu-mihon.gif
I must be the only weirdo who wants the opposite: equator up. South-up in the Northern hemisphere and north-up in the Southern hemisphere.
Why? Because I want the Sun at the top of the screen (or more accurately, the sunny side of buildings/hills/anything).
W/r/t Sun angles, things are pretty weird anywhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
I think it's neat to see that the route is along a great circle -- that wasn't clear at all before this change.
Hope they can update this, which would make international flights seem even more impressive than they already do.
</sarcasm>
https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/examples/sidebyside.html
Fun fact: this is called a rhumb line, ie a line of constant true bearing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line
Greenland is the size of Congo, around 2,2 million km2 while entire Africa is around 30 million km2. Europe being around 10 and North America 24 million km2.
-- sermons of J Donne (as quoted by oppenheimer)
https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas
https://i.imgur.com/0xEG4pb.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/bxwr3Ez.jpg
I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.
That said, prior to knowing this trick I was stuck with the effectively unmaintained Google Earth instead of the web view primarily because of the web maps insistence on the 3D rendering mode. The attempt to conform buildings and, most annoyingly, trees to the elevation data makes the imagery almost useless at close zoom levels, as all the actual detail disappears into clutter artificially introduced by the edges on the elevation data. It significantly reduces the amount of spatial resolution you can get out of areas where they have very good images.
Earth still has tools that web view doesn't have, but often I'm not even that interested in measurements and just want to be able to carefully inspect the image. This doesn't seem to be something Google wants to support any more!
Honestly, I feel like this makes the situation even more indefensible, because I get that collecting high-quality DEM is very expensive and so trying to use it comes with a lot of compromises. But if they're just substituting in models of "similar trees" like one person on Quora suggests it seems almost embarrassing for them that they're making the user experience more frustrating in order to deliver a 3D street-level experience that's still so bad as to be useless.
You definitely can't use Street View data alone for objects not at ground level. Actually, sometimes there is no Street View data for a place, at all. E.g. check the planes on the runways at airports like SFO, AUS and JFK. Incidentally, the varying quality at different airports is also a hint of how easy it is to fly over each of them at the ideal altitude(s) and how often one can get the necessary permits to refresh imagery.
I think it's all fantastic, extremely fast, smooth, love the inertia on spin, the camera movement or simulation of is great, occlusion of objects nicely done.
Would like to see an example with clustering.
Is it possible to add elevation data ?
Is it possible to access this mode in the API to use the webgl version ?
Just give me the satellite or the Street View photos.
TBH Bing's "Bird's Eye" view was far more useful that the shitty resolution (mandated by law BTW) satellite photos.
Of course, Microsoft killed it :(
You just have to unzoom far away from earth and it'll show you a menu where you can choose where you want to go.
https://www.google.com/maps/space/mercury/@47.5337211,-157.4...
Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application? Or will they merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool purely for consumers to wow at? Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.
https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html
Speaking of which, GeoGuessr [1] is a great example of how to enjoy Google Maps. You start at some random streetview and try to figure out where in the world you are by walking around (and hoping to see a sign or two)! A lot of times you end up in dirt roads in small countries, and it's really cool to see what it looks like there.
[1] https://geoguessr.com/
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/
I wonder if this tool stays free, lots of site owners are complaining about paying much more with the new pricing.
But that seems to be Enterprise level only.
They seem to have already updated for the new level. They also have advertisements and are a profitable business.
My guess is that they "Contacted Sales" like the Gaming API asks you to do and have a very agreeable discounted rate.
Nowadays, you can build or buy a Liquid Galaxy to get a better experience than the Origin's, at a fraction of the price: http://liquidgalaxy.org/
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M
He said that the government had photography so detailed, that they could find a golf ball on a golf course, and even tell you what brand of golf ball it is.
https://www.quora.com/How-powerful-are-the-cameras-on-modern...
TL;DR is that satellites have a 9 cm resolution at best. That's not enough to see a golf ball (4 cm diameter), and far away from discovering a producer's imprint on it.
With drones you can get an order of magnitude better, but that's still only barely enough to find said golf ball, and not enough to read fine print.
> He was explaining that the satellite maps provided to the public
That does not imply satellite maps.
Please refrain from baseless accusations. Thank you.
I used to install Google Earth on my all machines
Granted, nothing compares to actually experiencing the culture and places in person, but street view makes for a completely different, incredible experience.
(eagerly hanging out for orbit view milky way, but probably not in my lifetime)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1mkjkTqg0Y
Now it's a Chrome browser promotion. Google Earth requires Google's browser.