Shortly a week after Microsoft released updates to Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D, Google on Wednesday unveiled an update to its 3D geospatial viewing application Google Earth, that aims to offer a more persuasive viewing experience including a number of features that fans and observers have been waiting for.
“The much awaited update is the addition of Street View, previously available on Google Maps.”
“Google Earth 4.3 for PC, Linux, and Mac has been released in public beta, with an official release expected in a few weeks.”
The brush up to Google Earth incorporates a number of features that fans of Google Earth will be pleased about. Some of the striking features include real-time day and night lighting effects and enhanced POV controls.
One of the updates in Google Earth 4.3 are revamped map navigation tools, more 3D buildings, shorter load times for 3D effects–and most notably, the inclusion of Street View, popular on Google Maps, into the Google Earth client is a welcome upgrade and allows users of Google Earth to start from the stratosphere and zoom directly down, much farther than they were able to before.
The Google Earth 4.3 beta has enhanced photo-realistic renderings for dozens of new cities, including Boston, Munich, and Tokyo. Though this is not a major release, but it still shows off some eye-catching tweaks.
“The real-time lighting effect illuminates the Earth according to the time of day, and actually creates a sunrise and sunset effect on other layers at appropriate times when turned on. Skies change colors, and rendered buildings cast shadows on one another.”
Google Earth 4.3 beta offers a novel means to navigate the globe at street level using video game-style controls rather than its traditional camera tilt interface.
“We spent a lot of time rethinking how users interact with 3D data,” said Peter Birch, a Google product manager, in a blog post. “We realized that when in outer space and far above the ground, you really want standard map-like controls that allow you to pan and zoom smoothly. However, if you want to get down to the ground and check out a city street, you really want a street-level navigation mode like you would typically find in a video game.”
Rather than gazing at rooftops trying to distinguish what your office building looks like from the top down, now you will be able to get all the way to street level and look at your building’s front door, as though you were standing in front of it.
The new 3D buildings layer has also been tweaked to run faster, with buildings appearing in gradually increasing detail makes the new version of Google Earth truly worth downloading.
According to Birch, Google also updated a speed increase in 3D rendering and building detail in the new version of Google Earth, likely to make the entire experience of viewing a city or a location from all angles and from the street seamless.
“When you turn on street view, you see images of the street with cars passing by overlaid onto the 3D building edifices.”
Clicking on one of the street-view images to view full-screen and go through the location you are viewing the way Google drivers did as they cruised through town taking 360-degree photos. Street View has also improved somewhat in detail with “jump to street view” appearing as rendered icons on the map when the layer is activated. Images have also been assigned dates so users can notice how up-to-date their chosen view is.
Launched in 2005, Google Earth now supports 26 languages — 12 new languages are included in the update and they are: Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
“According to a Google spokesperson, Google Earth has been downloaded over 350 million times.”
Users can put forward their own 3D models for insertion in Google Earth by uploading them to Google 3D Warehouse, an online model sharing resource.