Google Earth Studio

Worked (as was able to submit an access request) on the latest Firefox.

It looks like they are waiting on WebAssembly Threading. I agree with you though, Google should help develop WebAssembly vs just creating a Chrome only solution:

"Our 3D rendering engine currently uses a Chrome-only technology called Native Client to power Earth Studio. However, we’re closely tracking the evolution of WebAssembly (especially threading). Stay tuned!"

There is a clear difference between not giving a shit about browser divercity and standards and building a specific product on top of Chrome which is, also a web browser.

Lots of companies don't give a f*ck and only do it if the market share are big enough.

It's a desktop tool to generate video flybys from google earth. Not a website they expect people off the street to visit. How would you deliver such a thing in 2019?

In the past this would have been a standalone app like google earth itself was. With a big download and an icon on your desktop.

Or, they could simply bundle Chrome into the app as electron to give people the exact same thing but avoid snarky hacker news comments.

Or, better still, they could do what they did and ship it as is.

The correct response to this used to be "wow, that's pretty cool that they can make this work in a browser".

What browser are you using?

I don't like the 3D 'enhancements' either, but if they look like they do in this video, I'll stop complaining.

It's the fact that they actively degrade the tile content that annoys me.

in the menu with satellite enabled.... disable globe. this takes it back to the 2D map style.

Getting the plain imagery in Google Maps without the falsified 3D models is pretty straightforward. After switching to satellite view, just open the sidebar that lets you select between regular map, satellite, and terrain views, and below it you'll find globe, traffic, transit, bicycling. Click the globe option to disable it, and it'll revert to the plain 2D view.

I'm not sure if this is the same type of un-easyness you're referring to, but the whole video made me feel physically un-easy. The video is rendered at a very low framerate, and that combined with the fast motion of the camera is almost nauseating.

Aside from the low FPS, at 14-15 seconds, when the camera zooms past two skyscrapers on its left, I very quickly noticed (without having to pause the video and examine it) that the the buildings had low-res textures compared to what you would find in a video game or compared to real life. Perhaps this, combined with the low FPS, is what makes the experience so uncomfortable.

But while this may not be good for close-up fast moving shots, it certainly does seem to have useful applications (see 0:27, 0:33, 0:45 in the video).

And it's still very impressive how far our technology has advanced - the first heavier-than-air flight was about 100 years ago, computers are also just decades old, and yet right now we are using algorithms to combine satellite imagery and images taken from the surface (street view) to make a 3D model of our world that is explorable in real time (the Google Maps website has this 3D view feature on it).

Maybe it already has and you've been playing it for years!

Some years ago there was a company that developed a "Social network" plus some games (Rally, etc) on top of google earth. It was called YoubeQ.

Google seem to think that's a good idea - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2018/03/16/googles...

Here's hoping* that this eventually matures into a widely available (if not free & free) 'Scenario Pack/API' provided by Google and available to any Developers, - Not just for leisure, but for practical purposes.

We need Google maps and street view to become consolidated (through a combination of physical mapping with drones, and CG via Unity etc.).

Once this is seamless, and any 3d point in space + direction can generate a full 3D render (in real time), it will allow for 'Scenarios' - Instances of the Gmaps globe that are pulled into applications.

'Scenarios' might be used in games:

- a 'real world snapshot, no wipes' scenario hosted on a game server, where players undertake a FPS survival game in an exact replica of the entire globe.

- On another server, there may be a '1991 zombie apocalypse scenario, 2 week wipes' scenario being hosted, where 'filters' have been applied to the real world snapshot to make the globe appropriately aged and decimated, with appropriate models and characters for that world.

Or more importantly, it might allow for serious modeling when utilized by certain platforms:

- Used for traffic flow - This could be incredibly valuable for use cases such as '3-dimensional traffic theory over San Francisco low altitude airspace - What impact to delivery drones will there be if a new skyscraper is raised in this zone?'

- For city councils and architects that are measuring heat absorption of concrete from the sun on the hottest day of the year / to model the wind flow through a city street that is acting as a wind tunnel.

The key to its success would be a) accessibility (Google or a third party maintaining this as an easily accessible platform & api) and b) rapid automation/layers (Being able to quickly load template 'scenarios' and apply 'filters' to them, rather than manually manipulating the instance).

While there are plenty of academic and technical tools available now for modeling, there is nothing ubiquitous and simple enough that allows a layman to 'load up the world as of 15/12/2018, now raise the global temperature by 5 Celsius, now fast forward 20 years.' If Google provides the API, then industries will rapidly set itself up around it.

It will be interesting to see how security & privacy are handled in these spaces. How do you prevent (and should you prevent) someone mapping the inside of your own home? Presumably, the primary strategy will be simple obfuscation (3d zones are tagged with a certain privacy level, which forces them to be randomly generated with each instance, rather than allowing true mapping)

*And goes without saying, here's hoping Google practices change so consumers aren't taken advantage of with such a platform

Is there robust integration of google maps with arcGIS in general? If not, then I would not expect any unique integration of the two platforms strictly for the google earth studio context.

news stations who don't have good animators

The trailer shows a bunch of use cases. Basically whenever you want to have a visualization of a map / area.

In New Zealand we have an annual 48 Hour Film Festival where amateur film makers make a short film in well, 48 hours. I can definitely see this being used heavily in next year's competition.

I work in commercial real estate and this could be a viable alternative to drone footage for many of our sites.

First thing I thought. Wonder what he's been using to animate Google Earth in his existing stuff - manual camera movement and screen recording?

A multi-scale pyramid of tiled images allows O(1) access at arbitrary scales at positions, independently of the size of the whole thing. It may be something like that.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted but this is a pretty serious shortcoming.

You could probably animate a regular sunset with it a few times before Google sunsets it.

Think about something and write it, then!