Bloody hell. Sometimes you see something, or in this case download a piece of software, that makes you go “that is awesome”, and actually mean it. Here is one such piece of software.
World Wind is a NASA app. It provides you with a globe that you can spin around, zoom in on and generally have a poke around in. Not brilliant so far - you can do that with an atlas. But once you zoom in on an area, the fun begins. World Wind downloads real satellite imagery from the web and applies it to the globe as you watch - you can zoom right in, from space, onto your favourite cities and have a peek.
Would you like screenshots? Check this shit out. Oh, and click on them for enlargements.
First we zoom in from that pretty overview of Europe to see my neck of the woods. Detailed, isn’t it? Perhaps a little too detailed, but at least you won’t get lost. You can turn the place names off if you like, anyway.
That’s about as close as you can get to the European scenery. Well, you can get a little bit closer, but there’s nothing interesting to see. Disappointingly, if you try to spot your house, you end up in a pixellated mess. Boo.
Residents of the good old United States don’t have this problem, however. Let’s say we live in the San Fransisco bay area - possibly, for the purposes of this article, in an airport. Start out by spotting your general area from the air…
And you can quickly get reasonably close. Very close in fact - closer than in Europe.
But bloody hell, you can get closer still. Not quite close enough to see a boil on a gnat’s pimply face, but we’re getting there:
Awesome. I am blown away. You can get close enough to see crowds gathered, cars in drives, markings in sports stadia (there is a football, i.e. soccer, stadium in Washington DC) - even the mysteriously mosiaced bits of the White House!
This app is genius, and the sooner they make that level of detail available for Europe, the better. Come on guys, you can do better! Please?
