Technoetic

A Google Earth product has been release and will replace the Keyhole application. My initial impressions are mixed. The Google Earth animations didn’t seem as smooth as Keyhole’s. However there are a few additional features. For example, there are 3D representations of buildings for some major cities. Before you get too excited, these are plain gray boxes, not images of the actual buildings. I doubt I’ll use that feature very much. Google Earth can give driving directions with a route plotted on it’s maps. I’m looking forward to using this more. The directions feature is basically like Google Maps with 3D terrain and the ability to control viewer perspective.

Some of the navigation and view controls are a bit more polished than with Keyhole but overall it feels like the same application with a slightly different look. One of the best features is that Google Earth is free. There’s also a subscriber version called Google Plus that provides additional features like the ability to download data from GPS receivers and plot it on a map.

See also: http://earth.google.com/