Liquid Galaxy, an Eight-Screen 'Holodeck' for Google Earth

Using Street View can be a lot of fun and can be a really immersive experience. Using Google Earth takes it one step further with the possibility to view any place on Earth, and on the Moon and Mars as well. But even with the biggest high-def monitor, in fact even with two of them, you're not going to get close to the experience of Google's Liquid Galaxy, an eight-screen contraption which completely surrounds the user with Street View and Google Earth data from a modified Google Earth Client.

The project started out as a tool for visualizing Street View imagery in completely immersible way. Several Google engineers got to work, linked several computers to eight screens and managed to get them to work together streaming Street View imagery. After every thing came together, they also set out to create a deck to support the screens and be presentable and mobile enough to be carried around to whatever conference Google may need to show off its geo projects.

This was done in time for the Google I/O 2009 conference in San Francisco where it made quite an impression. Watching StreetView images fly by can be fun, but now that the hardware part was pretty much completed, the developers wanted to take it a step further, so they got a software engineer from the Earth team to get involved. He built a modified client which would span the image across all the displays and the results speak for themselves. And the most interesting part about all of this is that it was all created during Google's 20% time project, which allows employees to spend a fifth of their work time on a personal project.

“[A]ll of a sudden, flying around in Google Earth really felt like flying, and exploring the ocean trenches was like piloting a submarine... You could even command your own lander down to the Moon or Mars. It was amazing to all of us how much more impressive Google Earth felt when we were surrounded by screens and able to turn our heads to look around (and even walk around). It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship,” Jason Holt, Software engineer, one of the creators of the project wrote.