Eventually, you start to wonder, though, how they do that. How do they create such finely detailed 3D models, down to the individual air conditioning vents and lawn chairs on the roofs of what must be thousands of skyscrapers in Hong Kong alone? It turns out that it’s all done from photographs and closely duplicates the way our own brains extract three-dimensional information about the world around us from our stereoscopic vision. I’ve personally lost more than a few hours exploring these virtual worlds from the comfort of my home office. Top-down view of a courtyard in the "suburbs" of Hong Kong. A map of these enhanced areas can be found here. In recent years, you may have run across areas where far more detailed three-dimensional data and imagery are available. The end result is that they’re adding that much data to the repository again every year or two. This both keeps the imagery up to date and retains an interactive historical record of how the Earth is changing over time. That's “big data.”Īdditionally, they try to update the imagery for major cities more than once a year and for other areas every couple of years. Zoomed in all the way, the full picture of the earth is more than 500 million pixels on a side and, even when compressed, corresponds to more than 25,000 terabytes of data (and you thought the Sony A7R IV’s piddly 61MP, 9,504 x 6,336 resolution was impressive). There are 20 additional zoom levels beyond that capturing ever-increasing levels of detail across the globe. Even the distant “pretty view” of the earth we see when zoomed all the way out is stitched together from something like 700,000 separate Landsat images totaling about 800 billion pixels (check out this great overview video). Still, what’s going on beneath the hood and the sheer size of the numbers involved is jaw-dropping. We’ve become accustomed to being able to zoom in to meter-scale resolution just about anywhere on the planet from our phones. Over the last 15 years, our interaction with this stunning perspective of the Earth has become so routine that it might not seem so impressive. These top-down photographs come almost exclusively from satellites. Hate speech of any kind will not be tolerated, and will result in a ban on the first offense.Both Google Earth and Google Maps have incorporated basic two-dimensional imagery since they first launched in 2005. NO SPAM! This includes promoting businesses through Google Maps links.Ħ. Any screenshot must include a link to the location in Google Maps or list coordinates in the comments.ĥ. Post from Bing Maps, Apple Maps or other services similar to Google Maps are allowed.Ĥ. Post must be related to Google Maps as a product or to something that can be seen on Google Maps.ģ. Do not post any personal information or addresses, not even your own.Ģ. Please bear in mind this sub is run by Google Maps fans and not actual Google employees! Complaints or feature requests are permitted here for venting/daydreaming purposes but if you really want your voice to be heard you should take it up with Google directly.Īlso, if asking about a specific place, please provide a link instead of posting latitude / longitude coordinates as plain text and forcing users to copy and paste it themselves. News articles, interesting map finds, and technical questions are all welcome here. This subreddit is for anything and everything concerning Google Maps or any related services such as Google Earth, Google Street View, or Google My Maps.
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