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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

By the way, Google Earth VR (2016) provides a similar experience but in virtual reality. Seing 3D graphics with depth improves a lot the experience.

You also have some nice features such as the possibility to grab the sky to rotate the sunlight.

This demo looks nice though. The post processing has nice colours, though the fake chromatic aberrations may be a bit high.

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To this day this is the best experience I had in VR by far. I spent hours roaming the earth, it's truly amazing. It's sad that Google is massively underutilizing this asset.

What should Google be doing with it?

As a complete non-gamer, the ability to walk around the earth with a VR headset would justify buying one to me.

There are so many cities I've always wanted to walk down the streets of!

As the parent comments mentioned, Google Earth VR already exists and it's awesome (disclaimer: I had a hand in creating it). It's as close as you can get to "walking down the streets" with current data. All the available 3D and Street View data is there.

First off, THANK YOU to you and the rest of the Earth VR team. You’ve brought literal joy to many people through your work.

I brought my Quest Pro and a gaming laptop with me to visit a nursing home a few months back and took some of the residents on guided Earth VR tours of their hometowns/places that they remember fondly. I’ll never forget all the tearful smiles I witnessed that day, and it’s all thanks to you and your team.

Quick question: are these new 3D Tiles the same as what’s in Earth VR, or are they higher resolution/newer imagery? The video demo linked upthread looks incredibly crisp, but I’m wondering if that’s just an artifact of seeing it in 2D (the upclose castle textures on flyby looked a lot more like what I’m used to from Earth VR).

This is a great idea. It would be interesting if Google had historical view of towns so in 50+ years I could see what it looked like when I was a kid.

There is a time slider in Street View today https://blog.google/products/maps/go-back-in-time-with-stree...

I think in Google Earth desktop there is (was?) a time slider for aerial imagery as well.

Always great to hear that people enjoy it :) I believe that this API uses the same up-to-date tiles as Google Earth VR and the 3D view in Google Maps. I saw some complaints on Twitter saying that maybe the last and highest level of detail is not available in the API but I haven't verified that myself. I don't currently work at Google and have no insider information.

Team up with microsoft and asobo.

They seem to be doing fine on their own. I prefer to have some competition.

What's wrong with companies teaming up for specific individual products? In this case, Flight Simulator. You license the technology with friendly fees and collab for the life of a single product. Just like all licenses.

(Also, no, MS/Asobo are not doing fine, their photogrammetry is renowned for looking like a molten hellscape, and the bing maps look pretty terrible compared to even plain gmaps, but it's MS so "it has to use Bing" =D)

I thought it was Blackshark.AI doing that specific part of Flight Simulator. AFAIK they are, or at least were looking for to, also selling that capability to other companies; and they are certainly not “vendor locked” with MS’s data..

but what about capitalism?

What about it? Google charges MS/ASobo a "friendly" license fee, and MS/Asobo get a feature they can use to attract more players. All parties stand to gain concrete dollar amounts, the very backbone of capitalism.

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