| Google earth is a wonderful benchmark to see, how technology evolves. To fly in google earth and to record it in the same time pushes consumer hardware to its limits. The Boston movie much further below on this page had been made in 2006 on an G4 iBook, the rheinfall flight (dec 2, 2006) on a Mac Mini. It had been in November 2006, when Google earth first introduced flight simulator features. The recent flight simulator (December 2008) disables to see 3D building but they show, when the user insists. The next 4 flights were recorded on December 24, 2008 on an iMac (3.06 GHz Intel Core 2, with 4 Gig of memory). Google earth has become more realistic and buildings got textured. For the following 4 movies, my iMac recorded Megapixel frames in real time. (see some original frames) The movies have been reduced for the web to a 400x310 pixel size. |
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Flight through Cambridge, MA, especially Harvard. Music: Bach fugue: Partita, 6. |
Flight over New York. Music: "New York, New York" song by Frank Sinatra. Source. |
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Flight over Zürich. Especially nice flight though the Grossmuenster. Music: Zuerich Lied by Markus Horvath. |
Flight over Boston. Music: Via Con me, by Paolo Conte, Source. |
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Here is an experiment, I made with self-made objects placed on the Harvard Science center
in google earth. The objects were made with google sketchup. See the
exhibit page for a multivariable calculus course. Remark added 2008: I liked the early flight simulator because it allowed to fly arbitrarily slowly. The newer implementations are more realistic and like real planes, one has to have a minimal speed in order not to stall the machine. The movie to the right could not be done with current google earth versions. |
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Added March 2009: Here is a clip made November 3, 2007 shown in a class
where a problem appeared with the Matterhorntheme. The movie was made on a
white apple ibook. |
Google Earth Flight simulator experiments 2006Early in November 2006, Google earth introduced the flight simulator option into the software. The example to the right shows Boston. This movie was done on a iBook G4 laptop mid December 2006. |
| Place | Link | Info |
|---|---|---|
| Rheinfall | Google Video and page on rheinfall.com with photos. | Flight over Schaffhausen, Neuhausen, Flurlingen and Uhwiesen. This movie was done on a Intel Mac Mini (1.6 Gig Intel Core Duo with 1 Gig RAM), on December 2, 2006. Frames were recorded with Snapz Pro in real time. The Background song is Wuthering heights by Kate Bush (1978). |
| Zürich | Page on rheinfall.com with guide how to switch to "flight simulator mode. | Also near Zürich, the google maps are quite good. This is a short flight from the rheinfalls to the Zürich Üetliberg. The background song is from "Enya", a sound track of the movie "Gladiator". |
| An animation of 2005, when no flight simulator was available yet. This was recorded frame by frame grabbing screen pictures. |