Anyone tried zooming in on their house? I just did. The closest I could get was about the entire block. Go to http://www.google.com/ home page and click on “Localnew” and type in your city plus some local feature like a store, restaurant, or school. First zoom in on the road map, then click on “satellite,” then zoom in with the + or pan right and left the <> buttons.
Photos are about a year old so there’s no real-time spying as with video cams. What good is it? It’s like MapQuest on one hand, but also pinpoints the features you type in on the search. If you live out in the country, you could spy on your neighbors and get a picture of what all they’re up to. I suppose if you were going kayaking down a new river, you could explore the route in advance and see where all the falls and rapids were. Possibilities are endless.
Rats! Even if I use your link I still only get the UK version of Google which doesn’t seem to have this feature. I really wanted to know what Martin, Gary, and Dubh were up to a year ago.
Cool. I can’t see my house (too many trees?) but I can make out a few of the neighboring businesses. By the way, Lorenzo, looks like you’ve got a loose roof tile near the SE corner of your house.
Now that I come to think of it, I heard a rumour that the USG was contemplating ‘switching off’ GPS satellites, or otherwise making them unavailable for public use, on the grounds of Homeland Security. Now, I stress it was a rumour I heard, just after I bought my GPS navigator (typical!).
But it does make I wonder what ‘they’ think of fairly recent satellite imagery (quite detailed from the sound of it) being made publicly available like this too.
That’s pretty cool. I’ve used terraserver for years but this is easier to navigate, more recent images plus better quality.
I see two cars in my driveway. One in my spot and the other in the misc spot. That means my wife wasn’t home but I was and someone else was there. My daughters? My nephew? Who could it be?
Going for “Charley’s Guitar Shop” in Dallas, TX (which shows up with the label ‘B’ in the map), I don’t get any link or button for “satellite”. What am I doing wrong?
You can also get to this by going to http://maps.google.com. Then center the area you want to view and zoom in. You can switch between map and satallite with the links on the upper right.
It works fine on Mozilla also… though it does fail w3c checking rather spectactularly.
I found my house and some other places on the satellite. Urban areas seem to have
nice clear high resolution pictures, but rural areas aren’t so good. It stops you from zooming
in anywhere near as far. Ah, well.
I predict it will be very useful in creating urban maps for video games ‘mods’.
The technology is a little disturbing, but, though I looked up my homeplace on it, I couldn’t make out any features, beyond wooded areas vs. pasture lands and fields, and the occasional major highway.
