Google Earth has just hit a major milestone — one billion downloads. Wow!
In celebration of that, Google has created a great video highlighting some of the things you can do with Google Earth:
To show some of the ways that people have used Google Earth over the past six years, Google has compiled some of their stories and put them up on OneWorldManyStories.com for you to explore.
In addition, they built a great infographic showing off many of the features that you’ll find in Google Earth.
Included in the graphic:
• Explore the 80M 3D trees of Earth’s forests (introduced with Google Earth 6)
• Get lost in dozens of 3D rendered cities around the planet, as well as monuments such as Christ the Redeemer, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Pyramids of Giza
• Travel through time with Historical Imagery
• Swim among 1,288 shipwrecks, including the Titanic in 3D.
• Dive to half of the known oceans in high resolution
• Create virtual tours
• Walk in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong
• Soar through 100M stars and 200M galaxies
• Follow the Mars Exploration Rovers’ paths (Google Mars
One other fun post comes from Google’s Mike Pegg, who posted a list of his favorite things about Google Earth. Some of it is duplicated above, but he mentions some other useful tools like the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator.
With all of the amazing features in Google Earth, which is your favorite?
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.
The API for the Google Earth plugin rocks! 🙂
Without it there would not be a
planetinaction.com
Wishlist: Have all KML features available in the API
Congrats to the GE-Team! They have done a fantastic job over the past years. Also congrats to the great GE-Community who is steadily working on GE to make it better and better every day 🙂
Whenever I look down there on earth, I wonder at its complexity, its inter-connectedness and fragility. So, my favorite feature of Google Earth is the existential jolt it provides. Much of the content of the GE Community is inspired by that jolt.
The most amazing feature is that there isn’t a 64 bit version of it for Linux yet.
(No, running a 32 bit shared library in a multi-lib environment isn’t the same thing.)
An incredible amount of downloads, for a really great tool. Each time I go on GE I discover something new and amazing somewhere in the world.
Andy