GOOGLE EARTH 3D UPDATE

Google's highlighted locations, like Dubai, look a lot better and play out like a game of SimCity. Some places, like New York City, appear hopelessly blurry, even when you set the timer to 2020. The sensors are ideal for CubeSats due to their low cost and quick production. 3D-printed sensors, on the other hand, can be produced in a matter of days for tens of dollars. Google Earth Timelapse doesn't work well across the entire world just yet. 3D-printed and laser-cut hardware outperformed state-of-the-art semiconductor plasma sensors manufactured in a cleanroom, which is costly and takes weeks to complete. With Timelapse open, you'll get a big panel on the right side with a timeline from 1984 to today, and a few shortcuts to places Google says are particularly interesting. To access the timeline, open up Google Earth on the web, click on the navigation ship's wheel icon, and press the big 'Timelapse in Google Earth' button-or just go to g.co/timelapse. It took more than two million processing hours across thousands of machines in Google Cloud to compile 20 petabytes of satellite imagery into a single 4.4 terapixel-sized video mosaic-that’s the equivalent of 530,000 videos in 4K resolution! To add animated Timelapse imagery to Google Earth, we gathered more than 24 million satellite images from 1984 to 2020, representing quadrillions of pixels. Making a planet-sized timelapse video required a significant amount of what we call “pixel crunching” in Earth Engine, Google's cloud platform for geospatial analysis. The company explains what it took to make Timelapse happen: Luckily, Google happens to have some really big computers to handle the load. The company had to get clouds out of the way, correct images for perspective, and ensure seamless transitioning through zoom levels.

Google Earth Timelapse isn't just a huge amount of data properly mapping it across the globe means correcting the images for artifacts and problems. Now, Google has mapped all this data across the 3D Google Earth globe, where you can watch cities being built, forests being cut down, and glaciers receding. Google Earth Timelapse has been around for years as part of Google Earth Engine (which is a totally separate interface from Google Earth it's a weird Google branding thing), but it was previously only available in 2D. Entering the new 'Timelapse' mode of Google Earth will let you fly around the virtual globe with a time slider, showing you satellite imagery from the past 37 years.

GOOGLE EARTH 3D UPDATE

Google has pushed out what it says is Google Earth's 'biggest update since 2017' with a new 3D time-lapse feature.

Google earth 3d