Thursday 20 October 2005

Pic of the day: Main map from Google Earth.

WorldWind vs Google Earth

I've had NASA's WorldWind for a while. Despite the weird name, it is really just an electronic atlas. The Earth is depicted as a globe which you can rotate at will and zoom in on any point. You can also search for places. Satellite photos cover the entire planet, but some places in more detail than others. It should surprise no one that it is mostly American cities that are being shown in more detail either.

If this reminds you a lot of the more recent Google Earth, it is because they have exactly the same idea, not because they are related in any way. The interface is a bit different, although the most intuitive parts are the same: Rotate the globe, click to zoom to somewhere, use + and – to zoom in and out, arrow keys to scroll.

I found Google Earth to be enormously faster than WorldWind on a DSL line. The NASA server is just plain slow when it sends over one satellite image after the other. I suppose on a dial-up connection you won't notice much difference, but with a broadband the response from Google is almost instantaneous.

The basic layer of Google Earth is not very detailed, less so than WorldWind for those places in Norway that I checked out. The strength of Google Earth is the user-added layers. I noticed that in my own neighborhood, I found the names of a couple of the roads where I use to walk. Others of them were not named, so it seems that someone who added local info just happened to know these roads. As more and more people use Google, I expect to see more and more details about names and various types of businesses and services.

That said, Google Earth is still largely Google Urban America. The high- resolution maps and the in-depth statistics are still not worldwide by a long shot. If you live in Raleigh, you can probably find your house on Google Earth. If you live in Kristiansand, forget it. For now, at least.

And for the record, the basic version of both programs is free. Google Earth also has two paid versions that supposedly provide some benefit, although it wasn't anything of use for me.