Technoetic

(No, this isn’t another steroids scandal. I’m only speaking figuratively here.)

If you’re one of the millions of people that have started using Google’s new mapping service, you know how great it is. Even better, Google Maps has satellite imagery for many regions. Imagine if you could take that satellite imagery, rotate and tilt it, and fly through over it with full 3D rendering. It would be even better if you could overlay road maps and locations of interesting places right onto the satellite imagery. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Well, there’s an inexpensive application that does all this. It’s actually the ancestor of the Google satellite imagery application and it’s called Keyhole. Google acquired Keyhole last fall and uses their imagery.

I’ve been using this application for about a week now and it’s been very useful. For example, I recently started a new hobby (as if I needed another one) called geocaching, which is a like a high technology scavenger hunt using GPS receivers to located hidden items. I entered the coordinate of each cache I would be hunting into Keyhole and was able to visualize the surrounding terrain, measure distances between caches, and do a “fly through” of the route I’d be following to each cache. Sometimes caches are in relatively remote areas and parking can be an issue. I also used the satellite imagery to locate the coordinates of convenient parking areas so I could enter them into my GPS.

Backpacking is another of my hobbies and I’m expecting Keyhole to be valuable in preparation for some of those trips. I’ve also used it to virtually explore other places around the world (Keyhole seems to map many more regions than Google’s service). It’s been a lot of fun! Try out the trial version.