nomad4ever

I’m sure most of you have checked out Google Earth already. Google Earth is a virtual globe program that provides satellite maps and images to interact with.

Apart from being able to zoom into famous sightseeing places like the Las Vegas Strip, Miami Beach, the Mount Everest, you can even search for addresses, enter coordinates or just browse to locations of interest like your home town, your place of work or that special place in your memory, where you got your first kiss.

Unfortunately not all locations are digitized and rendered in a good resolution, so sometimes the level of detail is less than satisfying. On top of that you have sometimes clouds blocking the view to the ground. The software isn’t perfect either, as sometimes the sea levels are shown to high, which leads to mountains or higher areas are overspilling with ocean water, the most favourite location being Gibraltar, as mentioned by Wikipedia.

Nevertheless it’s an amazing and interesting tool, which can lead to interesting views. It gives travelling at your desk a whole new dimension.

So what’s the news?

With Version 4 of Google Earth a new feature was added, you can now practically change the ‘view from the top’ to a 3D image of the area, as height information was added. This leads to stunning effects, which are especially interesting for world travelers.

Just to give some examples I added here some of my recent destinations: right out of Google Earth and in comparison with a ‘Life Photo’ from the same location of the real spot.

How does it compare to real life?

Let’s start with Lake Batur, a nice spot close to Bali’s highest peak Mount Agung.

If you go there via Google Earth, this is what you can see, when switching into the 3D mode.

And now let’s see a real photograph of same viewpoint right at the entrance of this crater lake.

Pretty close, hm? Only the sea levels behind the Google Earth Image are a bit too high, this could be the above mentioned error, or the set viewpoint wasn’t low enough. Still I was quite impressed to see a very common sight.

Now imagine that you can do that from your desk and go to any location on this planet to check interesting places out! Of course it even looks better, the higher the differences are in altitude.

Another famous site is the Kata/Karon Viewpoint in Phuket/Thailand. Every day of the year you can see hordes of tourists having a great view from this hill at the southern part of the Phuket Peninsula.

What are they looking for?

It’s mainly the unique combination of the 3 sandy bays Karon Beach, Kata Beach and Kata Noi Beach with their blue waters and white powdery sands. Truly magnificent!

How do we rate in Google Earth?

Okay the resolution here isn’t so good, but still you’ll know what I mean and what makes this spot so interesting. I admit the photo to the right doesn’t show the exact same location, maybe because I chose the Google Earth Angle somewhere to much in the trees, where you can’t go with your camera.

At the end one example which shows the little flaws and limitations, which come with the software, mainly clouds and lack of vegetation in the Google Earth images.

Here is a picture of Mount Agung from a viewpoint around Candidasa in Bali, which looks nice with almost clear blue sky and palm trees in front of the mountains.

The same image from Google shows the same mountain cone, but of a “snowy” mountain, which isn’t possible just a few hundreds of kilometres south of the equator.

Hah???

Of course this isn’t snow – but clouds. And vegetation isn’t height-measured, which is correct, but will give you an distorted image of the surrounding.

Instead you can see rivers or streets, due to the fact, that the photo was taken from a 90 degree angle straight from the sky and only re-calculated into the shown position.

So obviously even Google Earth has still some way to travel!

Technorati : asia, destinations, earth, everest, gadgets, google, internet, las vegas, map, miami beach, planet, satellite, travel, zoom

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written by Chris