Reality Factory

My flat mate currently showed this to me and man im impressed

http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html
im guessing his has run rampant around the net lately, but if you've missed it this is the most amazing tool i have ever seen

google earth, is a 3d model of the earth it and has detail down to street level....i mean you can see people on the streets it's so precise!!!!

this has to be seen to be belived, not only does it have this great detail but it has mountains and valley's in realtime 3d!!!

i just can't say enough of this, it's a 10MB download but trust me it's worth it, it's like exploring the world from your own computer,

so i decide to put up a show us your house/cardboardbox thread starting with me and massive

....Ok New Zealand has not been surveyed that well, but there is no reason why you guys can't show us the detail of your house....

I'm curious to see how many people will post to this
so get downloading and posting pictures of your cribs!

Right under the red box.

they have integrated this into the google maps feature as well, so you can see a map of most locations (in north america at least) as well as switch to a satellite view of the location...OR see a combination of the two...

here's a shot of the gdgi offices in downtown vancouver in 'hybrid view'

Whey!

cool, Im glad i got a reply to this .... im so glad i was introduced to this tool, i mean you could technically plan an entire vaction from here, locating your hotel before you leave, and bars and malls an stuff to visit when your in town......

this is wicked the only place you can't see so far is ......wait for it........

AREA 51, it's been blurred out

You 2 must have broadband, on dialup the whole planet is a blur.

You 2 must have broadband

erm....yeah forgot to mention that i never really took it into account forgot that the images stream in, so it is kinda pointless for dial-up users,

theoretically it should work for dial-up users but may take ages for the images to stream in off the net thats all.

i personally use googlemaps alot - any place i'm trying to find now i do a google map of it before i go...and the maps are startling accurate.

there are places where the satellite view doesn't 'quite' line up with the actual roads, but the maps are still correct, for all intents and purposes.

because the satellite view is actually pieced together from thousands of individual pics, the overall view might not be 100% smooth, but it's very useful overall.

if you are on broadband you can just click on any location, the map will move & zoom over the new location - and the way that the data is streamed to your machine, often the satellite fully rendered view updates as quick as you can move the view around providing a very useful tool for finding locations & planning trips, etc...

very cool

this is my favorite new program. I've been having a real field day with it. i wish more areas were in hi-res though.

yeah and it won't work for us mac heads. but google maps does. i found my house a year or so ago. gets pretty close in too! i was laughing. must have been shot in the middle of summer. all my neighbors yards were brown and mine was spring green. oops! guess i better get a lil more environmentally friendly!

google is getting big just saw this on the uk news (channel 4) on the day this was first posted, they are going to give free phonecalls throught the internet now, this isnt somthing new its just the first time a big company has taken up the chalange.

It does get hi-res on dialup if you wait a while, seems to be very
spotty, bit in foreground only hi-res thing by me for miles.