Hacker News Reader

Comment by spdy | Hacker News Reader

Someone want to explain? It does not look free what is it useful for? Looks like Google Maps with a timeslider.

If I'm not mistaken, the benefit of Planet over Google Maps is that all imagery on Planet is less than 24 hours old. So, you can see daily snapshots of different locations.

The time slider is huge (albeit potentially creepy)... you can see before and afters of a disaster, check if someone's car was parked outside on a certain day, watch progress of construction, etc.

Sound like some version of Eye In The Sky[0], scary and unsettling.

[0]: http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

Except Planet's goal is global scale, and I don't think they are aiming to do anything real-time atm.

Keep in mind it's ~4m resolution. You can't see someone's car parked outside (or at best the car would be a single pixel).

In the video they are saying that the imagery will be available under CC license.

The biggest difference is that they take satellite pictures daily, while Google Maps takes pictures once every few years.

The photo of my backyard hasn't been updated for more than 3 years, for example.

A huge number of images are captured that just show cloud cover. Having more revists helps, but it may still be a serious constraint.

> Looks like Google Maps with a timeslider.

It's OpenStreetMap-based though, as far as I can tell (there is no attribution to either, but data is loaded from MapBox which I think only provides OSM).

If you click the info (i) in the bottom-right, you'll see that the basemaps are from OSM and MapBox but the raster satellite imagery is from Planet's satellite constellation.

Ah, I had missed that icon, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com