As reported in our previous post on Virtual Earth a number of new 3D cities have been included in the latest update. In this post we feature a movie of Denver - created as an illustration of our tutorial on creating engaging movies from Google and Virtual Earth:
Music by Denny Schneidemesser (well worth a click)
The model is as impressive as ever with the Virtual Earth system, if Virtual Earth was made a stand alone application for Mac and Pc then Google Earth would have a run for its money.
We are getting used to using the helicopter background sound effect and the soundtrack by Denny fits the flightpath to such an extent that it would be nice to have a plugin that automatically played music/helicopter sounds while navigating in Virtual or Google Earth.
The non YouTubed movie can be viewed from here (720x576, 34Mb, .wmv)
It's good to keep an eye on what's being done, and they've done some great work. At the same time, it's also disappointing how far short of reality those cities are.
ReplyDeleteIf you've been in a helicopter over a city, or looked at aerial photos, it's obvious that there's such a long way to go. Plus, only aerial is not very useful.
These virtual cities need to get to ground level and into the buildings before any of this becomes practically useful as a means of organising information in a geolocated sense.