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Higher resolution imagery coming to Google Earth

digitalglobeLast week DigitalGlobe, one of the primary suppliers of imagery for Google Earth, was given permission to sell higher resolution imagery. Previously they’ve been limited to selling 50 centimeter imagery, but that limitation has been dropped. They’ll now be able to sell their 41 centimeter imagery, and that will drop to 25 centimeter later this year.

While the difference doesn’t sound like much, Mapbox did a great comparison showing how much better 40 centimeter imagery looks when compared to 50 centimeter imagery.

In short:

If going from 50 cm resolution to 40 cm resolution sounds like a small change at first, remember that we’re talking about square pixels. When square A is only ¼ longer on a side than square B, it contains more than 150% as much area. Therefore, a slightly smaller linear size means a lot more clarity.

No word on when exactly we’ll begin to see this new imagery, but it sounds like we’ll see some of it within the next few months.

(via the Verge)

MapBox announces near real-time imagery coming soon

MapBox, who we mentioned briefly from the Where Conference last year, has just made a very impressive announcement — soon, you’ll be able to grab imagery as fresh as six hours old from many places around the world. With standard imagery taking weeks or months to appear in Google Earth, this would be quite a drastic change.

According to Wired, their initial goal will be on “getting images of news-worthy events ASAP. Images of things like landslides, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, train crashes, oil spills and other disasters, war zones, massive protests or other gatherings, ice-shelf break-ups, etc.”

mapbox-pipeline

Unfortunately, MapBox doesn’t allow you to export their data as KML into Google Earth.  Perhaps with this new imagery system there will be new ways to download and use it, but time will tell.  The MapBox interface is quite nice, but integration with other products such as Google Earth would make it far better.

They plan to launch this new system (“MapBox Satellite Live”) later this summer, so we’ll keep you posted.  You can read more about it from this post on their blog.