a place in time · 2005-12-12 11:39
The online mapping race continues, with a relaunch of Virtual Earth as Windows Live Local, and the Mac version of Google Earth appearing soon (some might say it was available if you looked hard enough).
The Birds Eye Views in Live Local are pretty amazing. Most cities in the US have been flown over by planes, taking photos at an angle, so you can see the building frontage. Not only that, but you can then turn the compass, and see the same buildings from other angles. This really helps the imagability of the city – you can see the buildings, the colours, the landscape and surroundings. Moreso, you can see the hills and vertical landscape that maps just don’t provide.
Now some canny guidebook needs to build overlays for all this.
One weird thing about all of these services is that they try to hide time. All the photos were taken at some point over the last 5 years, but nowhere is the date of the data available. This is important for usability (can I trust this view? will it look like this if I go there now?) as well as nostalgia.
Sometimes it’s great to see the past. Events occur in both space and time. Take this picture from Google Earth:
This immediately dates the picture to around summer 2003. It’s great to see Blockhead again, an unexpected delight. Wouldn’t it be great if I could go back further, before Tate Modern opened, and see what it was like then?
Then there are events happening that I can’t place – but others may be able to.
Another unintended result of Bird’s Eye view: large adverts and text are visible. Is this the next kind of outdoor advertising – Virtual Earth bombing?
The compass feature on the Bird’s Eye view is especially cool. One thing to note is that the four views are not taken at the same time. There can often be several months between. Here you can see the Apple Store in LA during and after construction.
All the imagery companies have historical data, often going back 10 or more years. Why not make that available as well? Sure, it’s an order of magnitude more data than currently stored, but in this neverending map race, it seems to me the services that embrace time will be the most used and useful.
comments
Time is important. I can’t understand why it took iPhoto until version 5 to get a decent calendar view, especially as date information is easy to get on a photo. It’s also the primary way I find images from my own archives on Flickr; it’s more useful than tags. (Notice also how popular tags like ‘dec05’ are.)
Not strictly relevant, but the discussion came up elsewhere and I thought I’d braindump.
— Paul Mison 12.12.05 #
Virtual Earth-bombing… I was in a planning session for an ARG a few weeks ago, in which someone was excitedly explaining how we could make clues visible online for a few hours by spreading them out in a field or park for a few hours till Google Earth grabbed an image of it, and then taking them away. We had to explain that Google Earth doesn’t have all of the earth’s surface under constant surveillance, nor does it update its pictures in real time. Yet.
On the other hand, a fortune awaits the first designer who can design a housing estate or a bypass in the shape of the Coke logo.
— James Wallis 12.12.05 #