mlc1us
12/08/09 12:37 PM
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News from Google LatLong
Quote:
As an avid travel planner or discerning house hunter, you might always be looking for another view of a location before you make your final decision. On the Google Maps team we're always looking for ways to make the search experiences like this more useful for you. This is what inspired our plans to provide a new type of mapping imagery.
Starting today, developers will have access through the Google Maps API to high-resolution overhead imagery that is presented in a new aerial perspective. This is currently available in 2 spots in California: San Jose and San Diego. This new perspective gives users the ability to tilt their view of the world. In addition to seeing hotel rooftops like in our current "satellite" view, users can now see both the rooftop and sides of the hotel at an angle. In fact, users can rotate around all the sides of a hotel to get 4 different views from back to front.
See an example at trulia.com. Even though this "perspective" imagery is not currently available directly in GM, it's probably (IMHO) just a matter of until before it is.
mlc1us
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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milwhcky
12/08/09 01:21 PM
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Instead of separate photos to navigate along, their perspective views are photos stitched together for one continuous scene. I found half of a jet parked at the San Jose airport.
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kjfitz
12/08/09 01:46 PM
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Cool shot of the NASA airborne observatory (C-141) at Moffet Field. I didn't know NASA was still flying a C-141. There is also a sweet shot of a B-17 and B-24 parked with some other nice planes at Moffet Field. 
The panning is much better than Bing's. Probably due to the use of much smaller tiles. Very smooth. It naturally leads to some perspective errors at the seams but not in a terrible way.
The behavior at the edges of coverage is (IMHO) more elegant.
In the current implementation the zoom seems to go much higher (with a little loss of focus).
The direction (N,E,S,W) widget is OK. Similar to the GE direction widget.
I like it!
I hope the new URL scheme doesn't break the old one and is easily de-codable.
kjfitz
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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kjfitz
12/08/09 02:09 PM
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Planes at Moffett Field are part of 2009 Wings Of Freedom Tour.
B-17G
B-24J
Since most office parks in the surrounding area have full parking lots this is probably Friday, May 15, 2009.
kjfitz
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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mlc1us
12/08/09 02:37 PM
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Try this one - switch map to satellite and have fun exploring San Diego harbor. In east facing view I found a couple of ships heading in. 
mlc1us
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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milwhcky
12/09/09 06:03 PM
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The San Diego scenes were also taken sometime this year. The F-18 crash site from December '08 is seen as an empty lot.
(http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/san-diego-f-18-crash-dec-8-2008/)
After I joined VGT in March '07, I was in love with birds eye views and didn't care nearly as much about posts of Google's satellite scenes. However, with the disappointing lack of BEV updates from Bing in the last several months, I'm becoming more and more of a fan of Google Maps. They continue to add a ton of high resolution street view scenes on a regular basis, and hopefully we'll soon enjoy their new aerial view scenes.
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