Last year we told you about a variety of cities that got detailed facades, after Google used their StreetView imagery and mapped it onto the sides of the buildings. Now they’ve added the detailed facades to New York City and they look great!
They’re not saying how much of the city has gotten the treatment, but it seems to be a massive area. While the coverage is a bit spotty at times, they seem to have covered virtually all of Manhattan. You can read more about it on the Google LatLong blog or watch the video below:
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Maybe you will be interested. DigitalGlobe published satellite photo of the plane crash site near Smolensk airfield where Polish president Lech Kaczynski and may others died on Saturday.
Here is kml:
http://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucker.cgi?action=landing&path=/&file=smolensk.kmz
It’s actually really easy to see where the images come from. They’re from Street View. You can see the same folks standing/walking in the Street View images that you see in the building textures.
These facades for NYC seem to fit the buildings better than the earlier ones for Los Angeles. I really don’t see as much distortion in image size — as in: those images that seem to overshoot the tops of buildings by several feet, or so-called “chunks of sky” as part of the facades. Color confomity seems to have improved as well, as the street facade seems to merge more seamlessly with the auto-generated ones further up a building.