Google Earth Platform?
by Patrick Ruffini :: September 4th, 2007 1:40 am 
Punch in the right combination of keystrokes in the new Google Earth and you’ll stumble upon an entirely new dimension to the software: a flight simulator! Google embedded it in GE 4.2 without telling anyone. This guy randomly discovered possibly the coolest easter egg ever. Download the new software, and press Ctrl+Alt+A (or Command+Option+A for higher beings Mac users) to access it.
I was wondering when Google or some third party would find a way to incorporate a flight simulator in Earth. It may be the “best software program ever,” but to date the cramped viewing options (side to side and level to down) were a real limitation of the product. The simulator interface is a much nicer way of taking in all Google Earth has to offer. I’ve been stealing a few minutes here and there this weekend to explore Earth in a totally different dimension. The other night I managed to fly my F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge. Tonight, I explored the Hawaiian archipelago in about 20 minutes, jumping from island to island at 1100 knots.
The only disappointment is that it still updates scenery directly below you first, rather than what’s in your field of view. This leads to somewhat degraded scenery quality when you’re moving fast, but it’s still pretty breathtaking, even for an old MSFS guy like me.
Even before Google embedded a small “game” in Earth, the add-on possibilities were obvious. From a gaming perspective, the next logical step is giving users the ability to hack their own planes and scenarios. You could easily envision a quick World War II-themed game around the Battle of Britain or Pearl Harbor. Now I don’t have to pay $29.95 to dogfight the Luftwaffe — I can stumble upon games like this as a layer in Google Earth, and jump from game to game to game.
There was a time this spring when I thought Facebook ran the risk of exhaustion. Turning themselves into a platform business changed all that. A Google Earth Platform could be similarly game-changing. Not only could you have multiplayer games, but you could have creative ways of displaying live data, including live weather conditions for any spot on Earth, live global cloud cover, the FAA’s live feed of all aircraft positions in the U.S., etc. Users can currently import data like this via relatively static KML files but they don’t scale downward very well — they’re often a single JPG image grafted onto the entire planet. What I’m talking about is introducing data layers that rival Google’s own imagery and topography data in scope and complexity, via structured data formats that telescope in the same way Google does to give you just the local data you’re interested in. You could also query the dataset vertically, to find out everything available about conditions in a certain ZIP code, etc.
Tagged: google 
google earth
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