Googling around the world !!!!

How often do you use Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/ ) ? More and more people are now becoming aware if this application and using it extensively. For those who are not aware , let me brief you on what this wonderful application is.

Google earth is an application that combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. You could

1) Fly from space to your neighborhood by typing the address and zoom right in.

2) Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.

3) In the ariel view Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.

4) Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations for later reference.

Now, that’s a mouthful. Just imagine, something that only till a few years ago was privy to set of people in institutions like NASA, ISRO and other organizations that utilize satellite imagery( eg. Businesses that provide GPS and other location based services) is now available to anyone with a desktop computer. The application is also free and so “everyone” can afford it.

While this may not look like a big deal, but is definitely a precursor of things to come, and which indeed would be a big deal. For right now , not every part of the world is covered to same level of detail, this is only a matter of time, provided there are no legal issues that crop up on the way. I have been playing around with the application for quite sometime now. Always wanted to go see the Grand Canyon but could never make it. Thanks to Google Earth. I have already flown over it a number of times now. For many of the cities in US, you could also zoom in from the top(from a satellite/air plane ) view down to a street level detail and choose to see the map in 3-D perspective or a flat area map optionally annotated with locations for hospitals, hotels, schools, etc. Imagine planning a trip to a city in the US and you could actually choose where you want to stay and even peep around the neighborhood.

So, where does all this seem to be headed ? To start with, probably in the next 5 years, not just the US, but all major cities around the world would be mapped to a street level detail and then on for the second level cities and so on. So, if you wish to plan a holiday in any part of the world, you could actually go for a virtual Holiday first then decide. Travel operators could actually use this technology to help their clients choose their perfect holiday spot. Does this look like the extrapolation of the “Visual walkthrough” concept that has now become so common among architectural community in which they actually make their clients virtually walk through the building using a reconstruction of their model building through 3D software ? Is it the return of virtual reality , with a vengeance ?

The next level of virtual tours could actually be walking down the streets of a remote city , in real time , sitting on the desktop. Actually , Microsoft is working on a concept called the virtual local live, street level where they are not only using the imagery from the satellite , but instead are photographing the city from the ground and stitching the photographs together along the map so that you could drive a virtual car through the “real” streets. It seems that to capture majority of the city like seattle they needed to stitch together 10 million photographs. Find more details at http://preview.local.live.com/

So, what is required for the to make your virtual tour of the world more real ? More processing power to process the images, higher bandwidth to provide the real time experience of the virtual tour, more storage to store the millions of photographs…and guess what !!! This is all happening, every day, every hour , every minute and second…