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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

The 3D view looks so comically dystopian. The distorted effect makes everything look mangled.

On the other side of the pond, about 4 houses down... the backyard looks burned out and the pool is drained and bloodstained. This is like /r/writingprompt/

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What is up with that red spot in that empty pool for real though? There's a truck parked out front with the door open, obviously people are working on the back yard in general, but what in the world would that red spot even be? Bing maps shows the backyard done and the pooled filled and normal-blue-looking.

Dogfights. Empty pools are ideal venues. Handlers back up to the walls, spectators can see over their heads, and it's easy to clean up...

That sounds disturbingly real.

In some areas the soil has a lot of iron in it and looks reddish (like rust-colored literally). But I'm not sure whether this is one of those areas, and also the particular shade of red here seems a bit more vivid than just rusty-red!

It could just be a tarp or a toy that melted. Pools always attract a lot of dirt and insects. Without constant maintenance it will look discoloured pretty quickly.

There's also construction-looking vehicles parked out front of these house so it's probably under renovation.

yeah, weird. Apple 2D shows completed pool, 3D shows backyard before the pool was started. Must be construction or something.

There's some strange vehicles parked in front of the house too

Too red to be real blood, it's probably paint. Blood turns near black if it's old.

Someone may be using it to slaughter chicken or lamb

someone needs to make a VR open world game set in Google Maps 3D view

FWIW Google Earth VR on PC does let you walk around the 3D view and you can set your scale to be real-world. I'm assuming it's the same 3D reconstruction that you get on regular Google Maps / Google Earth.

It's definitely a must-try VR application.

Can confirm.

Everyone I demoed the first Vive to loved it, even though the reconstruction is far from perfect.

Google earth VR does have a VR mode which I have heard is amazing [0]. Their maps platform is also part of cloud and you can use it for gaming [1].

[0]: https://vr.google.com/earth/

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/gaming/

what for ?

novelty

sightseeing (1:1)

you may be a nobody in real life but you and your clan online control the Rome Colosseum

Google's 3d "enhancements" make it very difficult to use these images. I wish I could turn it off.

You can turn off 3d mode by the blindingly obvious procedure of clicking the hamburger button, observing that "Globe" mode is enabled (because it is blue) and then clicking "Globe" to disable this mode.

Don't be so foolish as to think the button labelled "3D" in the content area toggles the 3D mode. Only an idiot would make that assumption!

(The above is sarcastic. I think the discoverability of this feature, and the weird 1/3/1 modality behavior of the items in the second section of the hamburger menu is shockingly poor).

The quality drops off if you do that and you get a completely different set of images. There's no way to turn of the 3D garbage and still see the same thing.

Oh I see, yeah it's a shame that you get a different set of imagery too...

Where is that? I've looked and looked but can't find anything.

You can see that if you change the region to US from the link below the map. It may also enhance the resolution.

Ahh, I see, thank you!

It's straight out of JG Ballard.

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