Powered by Keyhole

Jun 28, 2005 19:48 GMT  ·  By

Google has announced today the launching of the Google Earth service which harmoniously combines 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capability and Google search.

Based on Keyhole technology, Google Earth enables users to fly from space to street level views to find geographic information and explore places around the world.

The application is free, has 10MB and is available for download here. Key features of Google Earth include:

- 3D buildings in major cities across the United States - 3D terrain showing mountains, valleys, and canyons around the world - Integrated Google Local search to find local information such as hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and transportation - Fast, dynamic navigation - Video playback of driving directions - Tilt, rotate, and activate 3D terrain and buildings for a different perspective on a location - Easy creation and sharing of annotations among users

Let's say you are looking for a hotel in Denver, but you don't have any information on the city or the hotels there. You access the application, you rotate the Earth's globe until you reach the United States and you start zooming in. You will notice that as you get closer to the ground, cities, mountains, valleys will start to shape. After you have found Denver, type in the key word in the right-side field, in our case "hotels", and the program will show you all the hotels in the area with detailed information.

The application also lets you to choose the layers you want to display and save your searches; you can also get driving directions.

Google Earth Plus is an optional upgrade ($20 annual fee) adding GPS device support, the ability to import spreadsheets, drawing tools and better printing.

Google Earth Pro is for professional and commercial uses ($400 annual fee), and it provides the ultimate research, presentation and collaboration tool for location information.