Sunday, February 8, 2009

A great week for mapping services

The last week has been packed with good news to the internet mapping services community.

With Google adding the upgraded ocean floor views just a a few weeks ago, and with the information of a big Google Earth announcement, we had all anticipated the festive launch of Google Ocean on February 2nd. However, Google played the cards right once more and had taken many of us, Google Earth enthusiasts, by surprise, with the new Google Earth 5.

Among the new features presented in the latest version of Google Earth are:
  • Google Ocean - new 3d textures of the ocean floors, ocean surface, and more. Basically an ocean-version of the terrain layer (read more in Google Earth Blog).
  • Google Mars - a new planet to explore via the GE interface. This is not an overlay or an Easter egg, but actually a whole new "product", with high-res imagery, 3d terrain and some cool information layers (read more in Google Earth Blog).
  • Historical Imagery - my favourite new feature, is this new time-line which scrolls through imagery of the same spot at different times, thus bringing back to life old imagery which was overridden with time (read more in Google Earth Blog).
  • Touring - a cool ,easy to use feature, enabling to create fly-to based tours, including narration (read more in Google Earth Blog)!


And if that wasn't enough, to complete this crazy week Microsoft has released tons (37TB, to be exact) of new imagery to Virtual Earth.

A new