This is the stuff I'd like to see Google do more of. Build things that are true to their mission of Collecting and organising the world's information. Truly remarkable.
Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
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Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#22>unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
I agree that we're doing things that harm the planet, but I downvoted you because it's more complicated than just "there are too many people", and "We're cutting down forests". If you look at the advanced countries, they are often the ones who exploited their resources and grew in size early. Britain, for instance, slashed their forests generations ago to get ahead. The US used to shoot herds of bison from trains. No…
The overpopulation crowd is like a meta-NIMBY. People with high income, “concern” for various problems, and who are amused by their toys and aren’t family oriented usually fall into that position.
Of course, like all NIMBY types, their consumption of air and Brazilian hardwoods is just fine.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#23Is this different than the historical imagery feature that was introduced in 2009?
I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth.
I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#24This is an incredible tool. I know there are other ways to look at timelapses of aerial views but this is just so easy and useable.
Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them.
As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#25Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#26>unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
Have a look at mortality and poverty rates globally. There is good news, as well as bad.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#27There's also https://earthtime.org/explore which is based off the same satellite imagery, but in the browser. And, it has a lot more available data layers with social, economic, and environmental data on a global scale.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#28There's also https://earthtime.org/explore which is based off the same satellite imagery, but in the browser. And, it has a lot more available data layers with social, economic, and environmental data on a global scale.
Google earth also works in the browser. A few years back, they made that the default way of accessing it.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#29This is really cool. However I'm going to bring you the Traditional HN Nitpick: it's very odd to see Google use these horribly over-compressed gifs over proper videos: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
Ya, it seems like someone really wanted a gif and threw it in a free video -> gif converter. Gifs can have over 256 colors (with some tricks) or they could have used `video autoplay loop muted` and achieved the same effect.
Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
#30With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. This is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving t…
Google has bailed on VR apps (for the most part, Owlchemy is still there), so I imagine not. It'd be cool if Google Earth VR was opensource like Tiltbrush. Like Tiltbrush it was one of the foundational early VR apps that people demoed, it's fun to imagine a world where Google continued to put money into VR, but I'm actually not sure how that fits into their business outside of just another platform for Android.