Google Earth Redesigned(google.com) |
Google Earth Redesigned(google.com) |
I tried it and works fine.
But it's a good first shot, keep going guys!
GFY.
Technology is amazing and moving rapidly, and if we can't take out five minutes to revel in an achievement like this, I don't know what the point is.
(I'll try it under Windows when I get home, and then maybe feel more celebratory.)
The interface is better than the desktop app, but that is just cursory from material design. I cannot tell if functionality has been lost quite yet---which is a common problem with redesigns. According to settings, KML support in this redesign is experimental.
I looked at it and have no idea why it took that long to load or how it was significantly different from either Earth or Maps.
E: It also runs a lot more choppy than the desktop version.
What achievement are we revelling in? That they've managed to replicate something a desktop app could already do in javascript?
The new one is marketed like the plague of interpretive centers that turn free discovery into a linear factory commodity experience of being told what is important, what to look at, and what facts to regurgitate on command.
I suspect the new one will be very popular for school teachers.
Other than that, the web version has some new features, possibilities etc., compared to the old desktop version. But that's more debatable perhaps.
The requested URL /static/9.0.31.6/balloon/balloon.html was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
Great...
Edit: after some F5-ing got it working. The 3D view is great! And I wonder why maps should be so slow. This feels much faster.
Edit2: I keep getting the 404 error every time. Looks like something is still wrong.
This is a cool feature that is no longer possible in this new "improved" Google Earth. The camera now comes to a dead stop.
I really hope they can add an option to bring back the "zero resistance" camera or whatever you call it. Or a flying camera mode or similar.
It means you can sit back and glide over a city slowly, just above the buildings or mountains without needing to interact. If you choose a nice slow speed, the approaching map data loads in time and you have yourself a nice aerial trip over the land.
Impressive.
It sucks too because we use the desktop one all the time at work - though we're slowly replacing it with custom Cesium-based stuff.
https://earth.google.com/web/@35.71013838,139.81057456,323.8...
Anyone knows if there is a parallel "open" version in the works (in WebAssembly or similar)?
"Learn more." just sends us to the Chrome page...
"Explore the far reaches of the world, right in your browser. "
But my browser is FireFox.
Most likely web-based Earth was launching just too early to switch from NaCl to WASM, which just shipped, and they'll port to NaCl soon.
This is the same with the new YouTube TV too. I'm not sure if it's a DRM issue or not. Especially galling if so given the controversy over HTML5 DRM content, after other browsers have decided to support it, to then roll your own solution anyway...
Edge uses PlayReady, Chrome uses Widevine, Safari uses FairPlay, etc.
As a content producer, you have to get licenses to use each of those technologies and run servers for them separately. It's anything but standard.
Firefox supports the same Google Widevine DRM as Chrome, so YouTube's choice of DRM system should not be an issue.
it honestly sucks but your phrasing puts the blame on inexperienced developers, which most certainly doesn't apply here.
How does that happen? I'm not even 30 and I remember when IE6 was new. Does everyone burn out or move into management by 26 or what?
Programming is really a weird field in that it seems to lose a lot of its workmen just as they start maturing into the experience level that yields a productive stride in other fields.
I know some make the argument that programming is a young man's game due to the required mental acuity, but I don't really buy that. Perhaps as people get older, they become increasingly less interested in staring into the computer and seek more social forms of employment?
We've got to be losing a huge amount of productivity by seeing experienced developers drop off the map before they hit 40.
Google is really the new evil Microsoft.
It is building it's walled gardens and enabling in monopolistic activities.
Apart from Gmail and Google I don't touch anything that Google makes in the fear that it will be half baked and will be cut the year after.
[0] https://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/google-earth-eas...
I do wonder what exactly is new here in terms of a casual user browsing the landscape. Google maps 3D offers, more or less, the same experience. And that's been around for a while.
Still, it's hard to be negative about this. The result is quite clearly better than every other comparable technology I've seen.
> Mozilla's Christopher Blizzard criticized NaCl, claiming that native code cannot evolve in the same way that the source code-driven web can. He also compared NaCl to Microsoft's ActiveX technology, plagued with DLL Hell.
For anybody who wants to see what this is a pale imitation of, Google Earth Pro for desktop is still downloadable and still free (and still full of weird unfixed bugs because they've been working on this "replacement" instead)
Even the fair at the field near my house [0] can be viewed in 3D!. Coincidentally they are currently building that same fair today, so for a moment I thought the images were live...
[0] https://earth.google.com/web/@52.08511654,4.31805086,0.37952...
It's free in the sense, that you can browse around, but if you wanted to do some analysis on it, you would need access to the raw bulk data, and this is very expensive.
There is free aerial imagery data available (e.g. ESA's Sentinel-2), but it has lower resolution (10m/Pixel). If you want to do the 3D building thing, I estimate you need data with something like 1m/Pixel and from different perspectives. This data volume is rather big (Exabyte-scale) and it is non-trivial to host and access it, so currently only the big players have it.
Except getting motion sick 5 minutes later.
cb=gapi.loaded_0:121 GET https://clients6.google.com/oauth2/v3/userinfo?key=[redacted] 401 ()
cb=gapi.loaded_0:45 Uncaught [object Object](anonymous function) @ cb=gapi.loaded_0:45
clients5.google.com/log?authuser=0:1 POST https://clients5.google.com/log?authuser=0 401 ()
POST https://clients5.google.com/log?authuser=0 401 ()This was a bad idea when Microsoft did it and it's still a horrible idea now.
It's not so different than downloading a Windows application that requires JVM or some .NET distributable, or a Linux package with additional dependencies, IMHO.
They have a Google Earth desktop client if you want a desktop application. As this is sitting on the open web it should use open standards.
I admit to looking at it slightly slack-jawed, that wasn't so much future shock as the future punching me square in the face.
https://earth.google.com/web/@53.74539679,-0.32722384,18.713...
This has been around for years.
When I visit this on iOS, I get a message that says "Google Earth for iOS is coming soon." Of course, there's already a Google Earth app for iOS. When I launch the Google Earth app on iOS, I get a message that says (roughly) "The developer has to update this application to work with future versions of iOS". This is weird since it was last updated in May 2016, though that appears to be a very minor update.
In other words, the old iOS app is effectively abandoned and the new one isn't available.
thanks for nothing.
I can see a long range of mountains from my 2nd floor windows. I want to drop down to approximately the same position and elevation (from my 2nd floor window) and take in the same view on Google Earth. The intent is to identify mountain peaks that I can not determine in real life.
Google earth limits the angle one can tilt while the POV is close to the ground.
[1] https://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2015/02/google-eart...
[2] https://www.google.com/earth/explore/products/desktop.html
http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/makepanoramas_en...
Edit: It generates panoramas with mountains and hills labelled .
Yes this is precisely the perspective I want to view on Google Map, with the added benefit of being able to double click on a distant peak and fly right to it, or perhaps also a feature to return to previous position so one can easily toggle between points of interests
Satellite mode without terrain can look fine in JS/WebGL. Once you start tilting the view and seeing terrain and buildings, the JS performance will be horrible pretty fast, and adaptive LOD streaming is hard due to the function call overhead.
I worked on the Google Earth desktop app for a few years, so this isn't idle speculation.
This new NaCL version seems to be nowhere near feature parity with the old desktop client, sadly. I hope it catches up, since I loved the historical imagery, for instance. The good news is that the desktop app still works if you want to see that.
What's funny is that if you disable WebGL then you get a much more usable version of Maps IMO.
edit: (honest question, dear downvoters...)
Google maps (Earth + 3D) works without problems. When I open the website with Firefox I get a nice text telling me that google earth is an advertising platform for chrome ;-)
'Aw snap! The new Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet. Try this link in Chrome instead. If you don't have Chrome installed, download it here.'
They didn't close the circle yet, to let trucks enter the midsection.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/37%C2%B020'05.2%22N+122%C2...
I mean, if you are including the Eiffel Tower in the intro pages, could both make it look cleaner, and make it use less net resources
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@32.65383541,128.71781037,186.9...
Good they cannot convert Chrome itself as a web app :D
[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
edit: Actually, the "earth" layer of Google Maps is identical to Google Earth. What's more up-to-date is the "satellite" layer which I only see offered in the mobile apps.
I think of this as "Drone View". I keep waiting for the JDAM impact.
Bing (via the Maps app) is also doing this type of thing, but with a less robust set of data.
Google's implementation appears to be based on oblique (angle, taken from plane) imagery similar to Bing's "Bird's Eye View" feature; if you open up old Google Earth you can see oblique shots from various angles that match the exaggerated coloring of the final 3D maps.
Seriously though, check out Apple Maps. I didn't think I'd be recommending it, as I nerd out about Google Earth a lot, but it's actually got great imagery & models.
The screenshots do look fantastic.
(Not a criticism of Apple if this isn't possible)
You can wander around in this rendered copy of Earth, today, in VR. And folks are so above it that they still say "eh, no killer app tho" without irony.
Id guess the details of the process are tricky, but it's possible then you only need to concentrate on getting high quality images vs. getting high quality images and high quality elevation data at the same time.
Rural areas probably have lower-quality image data (or noisier aircraft position data).
They also seem to have lots of trouble with pieces floating in the air, which imho could just be pruned (e.g. lots of floating train tracks here, presumably where there also has been a train at the point of geometry capture: https://earth.google.com/web/@48.51659545,9.06299404,316.491...)
> Of course, you can still access and download Google Earth 7 for desktop
https://blog.google/products/earth/welcome-home-new-google-e...
Depends on the reason for "Chrome only" - if they use (upcoming) standards not supported so far by other browsers I see no harm in it. Other browsers will catch up in time.
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=239656...
Doesn't seem like it's doing much in Chromium neither, just showing a static page: http://imgur.com/a/Q00OI
So I guess your little analogy doesn't work anymore.
>Get the new Google Earth now on the web in Chrome; on Android as it rolls out this week; and on iOS and other browsers in the near future. (Of course, you can still access and download Google Earth 7 for desktop.)
It surely is, but for me, it seems weird that a huge company like Google will give you these marvelous toys for free and they don't take anything in exchange.
What I mean is that putting people in a g-bubble like this is bad. I also wonder what the shinny 3 dimensional thing can add as a value to a standard map. In term of education for example: people don't even know how to read a map without a GPS and a map app now. I don't say that map apps are bad, but I don't know...
* They still can't read maps and gps today, they just follow instructions
I'm not seeing how this is different than an Intranet site requiring Internet Explorer or a video site requiring Flash. Unless you believe that Internet Explorer and Flash are "Bad" and Chrome is "Good"?
Furthermore most data is orthographic only, so you can built a nice 2D map out of it, but to do 3D I estimate you need images from specified angles (e.g. 4 views per place), and I think this data is still behind closed doors and quite expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry#Stereophotogram...
https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/18/laser-surve...
One of the motivations for the collection was flood analysis, which overlaps with your observation about coastal towns.
Isn't everyone doing this these days? All the UIs on PC software have been getting worse since the mid-2000s.
more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3apAXzf3JTg
There is nothing even sorta objectionable about Google software on Google servers requesting you use a Google browser to access them because it uses Google-developed browser features that aren't even part of web standards, and wouldn't be for years even if that was the goal.
The alternative would be a moral stance that "no non-RFC stuff on port 80", and that makes zero sense to me. What, they're not allowed to innovate unless they run through the bureaucracy first?
I'd love it if you clarified what you're asking for here, because as stated, it seems alien to me.
I have no issue with Google putting things over the wire via HTTP but if it only works with a specific client it isn't, to me, a web site but an internet-based application akin to Microsoft ActiveX-based sites which were awful for the web.
The whole point of the web is that it was developed as an open platform and we had to fight with Microsoft to stop them turning it into an Internet Explorer only platform. I don't want the same thing to happen with Google/Chrome.
I want an open web where I don't have to use one particular browser for certain services.
I should also say I do think Google do a lot of good though. They do work with the web standards committee and they do a pretty good job of making their innovations open so I am not quite as worried as I was about Microsoft but, to me, it is better to stop it before it happens than fight to get it back.
With that in mind, I have a real hard time getting worked up over Google putting a draft feature they're working on in their own browser. I suppose if Mozilla and Microsoft really want to implement a moving target, there's nothing stopping them from doing so.
If Chrome doesn't restrict it, then they start getting negative press about how this new thing they created doesn't work.
https://maps.apple.com/place?address=10365%20Gorenflo%20Rd%0...
There have been a couple small indie projects which basically load Apple maps in an iFrame, but I think they've been mostly C&Ded.
I'd like to say they did this to present a clean minimalist app but the recent incarnations of it are more cluttered than the pre Material Design version. Sure you can tap on the map to minimize the clutter and then tap again to make it go away completely but tapping also drops a pin if you hold it for a sixteenth of a second longer. And I hope your touchscreen isn't super sensitive because it'll detect that flutter as a double tap and then you're just zooming.
Regardless, it's pretty much already been killed. Too bad it's taken 8 years for a web standard (WebAssembly) to match it.
Yeah, there has never been a case of software breaking out of a sandbox or VM.
Fact is it allows running native x86 code downloaded from the internet, it's orders of magnitude more dangerous than e.g. Javascript running inside a sandboxed runtime.
Edit: Paul Kinlan reports that Earth is using PNaCl (https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan/status/854351477506277378), which means it fundamentally can't run outside of Blink.
Reminds me of the good old days of ActiveX!
For the record: I think that JS is a horrible idea too. What happened to the old rule of thumb that once you let someone else run their own code on your machine you should consider it compromised ?
People realized it's a stupid and impractical rule and ignored it.
If by "people" you mean developers, and by "stupid and impractical" you mean inconvenient.
And regarding elevation it seems it is also there inside: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/1795
Personally I use Gaia GPS and Pocket Earth for hiking/nature.
Incorrect, PNaCl runs on both ARM and Intel.
NaCl (without the P) had to be separately compiled for different platforms, PNaCl is portable.
Developers realized that their rule was stupid and impractical (not just inconvenient, but actively impractical: async interaction is faster and requires js), and so ignored it.
