I’m not usually one to get excited over maps, but Google Earth is fantastic. When it first loaded up I thought it was pretty shit. After a minute or two, Earth suddenly appeared. Interesting. The search bar caught my eye next.
If you give someone a pen to try out, they will write their own name most of the time. Give someone a map, and they’ll look for their house. I hit search and it slowly zoomed into a brown mushy image. Oh. Great. Then it began resolving. The first holy shit: that’s the town centre. A whip along the route to my house slowly started showing up the landmarks I see every day. There it was: my house.
That was good. But, now that it had the data cached, I zoomed out to planet level and did a single click to get it back to my house. My jaw literally dropped as it whapped from planet to house level. Wow.
I pity, truly pity, those who are not lucky enough to have good satellite data for their area such as those people in Glasgow (I’m actually in the nearby area with data available). Sure, I can’t think of any really decent uses for it. Sure, I’ll get bored of it sometime soon. As toys go though, it’s pretty fun to play with.