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8  Silicon Chip siliconchip.com.au Everyone who has seen a demonstration of Google Earth is gobsmacked. Mind boggled. Blown away. Hey, we’re not given to exaggeration – but we’ve got to agree. It is gobsmacking, mind boggling and blowing away! And the best part of all about Google Earth: it’s free! F or computer users in the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine life before Google. Only invented in 1998, Google has already entered the lexicon as a fully-fledged verb in its own right. You don’t search on line any more. You Google! Even if its name is an accident (Google was supposed to have been spelled Googol, a number with 1 and a hundred zeros, or 10100), Google itself is no accident! But there is far, far more to Google than “just” the world’s most popular search engine. Whether by acquisition or in-house development, Google has become an enormous powerhouse in the computing world. Here’s just a small selection of Google’s add-ons and other “products”: Google News – aggregated headlines and a search engine of many of the world’s news sources. Froogle – a product search engine and shopping directory. Assists consumers with locating products for sale online by presenting photos of relevant products. Blogger – a tool to make Web log publishing very easy. Google Toolbar – a toolbar featuring a Google search bar, as well as other Google tools. As of July 2005, Google Toolbar is available for two browsers, four operating systems and in ten languages. Google Deskbar – search tool which runs from the Microsoft Windows taskbar, without a browser having to be open. Google Desktop – where your search is internal; that is, within your own computer. Google Groups – join (or even create) discussion groups, mailing lists and newsgroups. Google News Alerts – Specify a topic and receive email updates when news breaks. Google Web Alerts – Find out about new web pages on a topic of interest. Google Glossary – Find definitions siliconchip.com.au by Ross Tester for words, phrases and acronyms. Google Search by location – Restrict your search to a geographic area. We could go on listing all day – but that would hardly leave room for the real feature of this article: Google Earth. If you’d like to go through all that Google itself has to offer, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Google_Groups Google themselves say their company philosophy is built on a 70/20/10 rule: they spend 70% of company resources on core business – like search engines; 20% on closely related areas (like news), while the remaining 10% is where their engineers run amok producing oddball projects which don’t fit anywhere but which are fun and/or interesting and/or groundbreaking. But wait, there’s more! Some time back Google bought a little organisation called Keyhole Corporation. Reports suggested the main reason they bought it was that Keyhole was working on, and had just about completed, a highly innovative project. Google renamed that project Google Earth. Without too much fanfare, Google Earth was announced to the planet at the end of June this year. And without wanting to get into hyperbole, I would describe Google Earth as “mind blowing”. Everyone who has seen it (and I’ve shown anyone who would watch!) is astounded. Google Earth is over-simply described as an image of the Earth, a globe if you will, which sits inside your PC monitor. When Google Earth fully loads, (and it can take a good half minute on a typical broadband connection), a beautiful view of the Earth against a star background is revealed from some 38,500 miles (62,000km) out in space. Not surprisingly (considering where it was developed, it shows North America. . . from sea to shining sea. But you can also “turn” the globe in any direction to reveal the whole planet. It looks pretty spectacular. Ho-hum? You’re not turned on by this? Anyone can display a nice picture? Come on down to my house... What if I told you that with the click of a mouse button, you can “fly” from right out in space to any point on that globe – right down to your own neighbourhood, almost right down to your own backyard (in some cases, into your own backyard!). You can zoom in, and in, and in – down to virtual ground level, in near-perfect clarity? Not quite so ho-hum any more? Twist it, tilt it, move it . . . Here’s another of Google Earth’s absolutely amazing features. With another click or two, you can tilt the view from straight down (plan) right through any angle down to horizontal (elevation). It’s not yet perfect – but by the same token, it’s not bad! And if you don’t like the view you’re getting, you can turn it through any point of the compass. You can flick back and forward between plan and elevation. There’s even a one-button “back to north” setting. And at any time, you can move the whole view in any direction with four compass points on the toolbar. Hitting the red button at their centre will lock the centre of the screen so if you turn or tilt you stay viewing the area you are interested in. You can reveal terrain, main roads, country and state borders . . . As you move around or up and down, you will note that the screen is constantly updating. Google Earth is refereshing images “on the fly” from its obviously immense image database. Note that as yet, you cannot access October 2005  9 hi-res images everywhere – this is an immense undertaking and will take some time – if ever – to complete (it’s actually still in beta form). They are obviously concentrating on the major population areas and working down. Deja Vu? The lonely planet from 30,000 miles. Almost home! 15,000 miles out in space. Some SILICON CHIP readers will be experiencing a sense of deja-vu. Something sounds familiar about all this? Back in May 1999, we introduced you to the “Terraserver” website which also offered “pictures from space,” with quite good resolution in some areas (especially if you paid for them). That website has undergone quite a downgrade, where now it appears to offer USA images only – but even in its heyday it was nothing like Google Earth. For ease of use, features, clarity, value – Google Earth beats it every time. Terraserver never had anything like the features of Google Earth we’ve already covered, let alone the bits we haven’t looked at yet. What about World Wind? We’ve zoomed in to just 3,500 miles . . . Here’s the view from 1000 miles up. You may or may not have heard of another, somewhat similar, site to Google Earth, set up by NASA. It’s called World Wind and it’s an 80MB download from worldwind.arc.nasa. gov/download.html. But in our brief look we found it doesn’t offer anything like the features of Google Earth. It is free, though, so you might like to have a play. The biggest difference between the two is that World Wind has all its images pre-downloaded; Google Earth updates its images literally “on the fly” – more on this aspect shortly. And while mentioning alternatives, there is yet another Google offering, at the moment still in beta and certainly not complete, called Google Maps. Like Google Earth (even yet) it is very much more “finished” when it comes to the USA but even it its limited state it looks very promising. However, at the moment there are other “map” sites which offer far more, such as whereis.com,Yahoo and MSN. Fly to Paris . . . At 100 miles, starting to see features. 10  Silicon Chip In some major world cities (particularly US and UK) most major roads are named. Click on “buildings” and all of the major buildings are outlined. When you tilt from plan to elevation at (near) ground level, the buildings become, well, buildings. (A tip: try this on London and New York City). You can also highlight major roads, places of interest, show the terrain or turn it off (it’s less confusing that way), show state and country borders, show restaurants and hotels (we’ll look more closely at that feature later), And before I forget, one of the most intriguing features of Google Earth: as you might expect (being from Google), it has search features. But they’re extremely powerful: for example, the “Fly to” search. Simply type in the name of the place you want to go to (eg, Paris, France) and Google Earth “flies” you there. Up, up and away – across countries, oceans, even the poles, until you descend into your destination. And I mean into – right down to ground level! You really do have to experience this one! Resolution In high resolution, the images, which appear to be taken from a variety of satellites, are stunning in their clarity. Individual buildings, even houses, are clearly visible. So are cars and trucks on city streets. Many are so good that you can clearly pick out car windscreens – and some even better! It would appear that the image resolution/quality has a lot to do with the source; also the “haziness” of the day in the particular city would affect it. In low resolution, you cannot see individual buildings. The general “lie of the land” is relatively clear and you can pick out major landmarks such as big bridges and so on. In hi-res, there is an optimum point to view detail – about 500 feet above ground level appears to be best. Any lower than this and images tend to become grainy and show artefacts. That’s not to say you can’t go lower – of course you can. When I first saw Google Earth, about six weeks prior to writing this, it was not long after the London terrorist attacks. At the time, there was considerable (misguided!!) newspaper and TV reporting about the fact that on Google Earth you could see the ANSTO atomic reactor at Lucas Heights (south of Sydney) in great detail – and they showed it on the evening news, to prove it! “Authorities” were calling on the reactor site image to be pixellated on Google Earth. In their typical “grab a story and beat it up” manner, the media failed to mention siliconchip.com.au Google Earth gets a lot of its imagery from DigitalGlobe’s “QuickBird” eye-in-thesky. This satellite orbits the planet at 450km and has a resolution as low as 61cm on the Earth’s surface. Even this will be greatly improved early next year when the their “WorldView” satellite is launched. It will have a much higher orbit but even better resolution. the fact that you could type “ANSTO” into whitepages.com.au and get the street address, then go to whereis.com, type in the street address . . . and up comes a map with the word “ANSTO” actually shown in place! Hmmmm. I digress. At that time, some capital cities (Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra especially) fared very well when it came to hi-res images. Much of Melbourne was, at least then, lo-res, a lot more obscured by cloud. Even some major centres like the Gold Coast were in hi-res (but not the Sunshine Coast). Unfortunately for me, Sydney was also about 50% lo-res. For those who know Sydney, everywhere south of the city was brilliant but the city itself and anywhere north were not. Not being able to view my own area at the time, I decided to find my mum’s place on the Gold Coast. Zooming in and following the Pacific Motorway north was dead easy – then I got to the familiar exit ramps at Mudgeeraba. I followed the road along until I turned off towards Mum’s retirement village. Next I zoomed right in and was easily able to pick out her villa. It was so clear I almost expected to see her standing in the front garden waving to the satellite . . . The above paragraph gives us land-bound novices a good clue on how Google Earth is best navigated. “Flying” over large areas and finding objects is not quite as simple as it sounds – just ask any pilot who’s had to learn to navigate. The view is a lot different from “up there”! The trick is to find something that you do know and follow roads, railways, rivers etc, to where you want to go. The exact latitude and longitude of siliconchip.com.au where the cursor is located is shown at the bottom of the screen – I’ve made a note of various things I might want to go back to. And when I say exact, it is that: it’s calibrated to degrees, minutes, seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds. (At the equator, a degree is about 69.16 miles or 111.11km, so a minute is about 1.85km and a second about 30.8m. That makes a hundredth of a second just 30cm – about a foot in the old money!) 30 miles (160,000 ft) – becoming clearer. 30,000 ft right over the centre of Sydney. Oooh –it’s changed! Very recently, I was idly “playing” with Google Earth (it still fascinates me!), once again looking at Sydney. Hey, what’s this? All of Sydney City now in hi-res – you could even see the shadows of the Harbour Bridge on the water! Oh, bliss! So I quickly “flew” up the northern beaches and, sure enough, hi-res images greeted me for at least most of the way. As (good!) luck would have it, the hi-res images ended about 500 metres beyond my place! Yay! And I must admit our publisher was pretty chuffed when I showed him his mansion in glorious hi-res . . . This demonstrates the evolving nature of Google Earth. As new images become available (and obviously the time to work on them) they will be implemented into Google Earth. Our deductions, from looking at homes and buildings under construction in our area, is that the image was captured about February or March of this year. The image of southern Brisbane, while hi-res, is about two years old. I can see a town house I now own still “under construction” (in fact it is just a patch of dirt!) – and I’ve been paying for it for 10,000 ft and the city streets are visible. 1,000 feet above the Opera House Finally, 500 feet – yep, those are people! October 2005  11 more than a year since completion! Who supplies the images? Here’s what happens when you highlight the “buildings” button: all of the major buildings in New York City appear, complete with shadows! All of the images which come up on Google Earth are copyrighted to various organisations. Brisbane closeup, for example, is copyrighted to DigitalGlobe, while as you zoom out, the copyright changes to EarthSat. DigitalGlobe appear to own their own satellite – QuickBird, launched in 2001, which orbits at an altitude of 450km, in a 98°, sun-synchronous orbit. They claim it is the only spacecraft able to offer sub-metre resolution imagery, industry-leading geo-locational accuracy, 128GBits of data storage and an imaging footprint 2 to 10 times larger than any other commercial highresolution satellite. Its resolution is 61cm panchromatic and 2.44m multispectral. With a swath (image capturing path width) 16.5km wide, every year QuickBird collects over 75 million square kilometres of imagery data. But even that will be overshadowed by DigitalGlobe’s next satellite. Scheduled to launch no later than 2006, WorldView will be the world’s only commercial satellite to snap pictures of the Earth at 50cm resolution. The satellite’s higher orbit, at nearly 800km, will allow it to revisit collection areas more frequently – about once a day. The WorldView system will include more efficient image processing systems and multi-satellite collection planning, shorter tasking timelines and an expanded network of remote ground terminals. DigitalGlobe’s imaging constellation combining WorldView and QuickBird will be capable of collecting more than 4.5 times the imagery of any current commercial imaging system. By late 2006, WorldView alone will be capable of collecting nearly 500,000 And now look what happens when you “tilt” the image. We’re at about 45° here – you can go down almost to ground level if you wish! To prove the point, here’s the elevation view of Manhattan from 90 feet. This actually has the “terrain” feature switched on but NYC is fairly flat . . . A section of lower Manhattan, New York City, from 1 mile up. The brown area top centre-left of the pic is where the World Trade Centre once stood. They are a bit indistinct at this size‑ but each one of the labels shows either a restaurant or hotel. Advertisers pay to have their business names appear. 12  Silicon Chip square kilometers (200,000 square miles) per day of half-metre imagery. EarthSat, on the other hand, uses a variety of satellites including the various Landsats, SPOT, IRS, IKONOS, Terra, JERS, AVHRR, OrbView and DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird. Depending on the swath, and therefore the resolution, some of these satellites have a revisit time as short as 1 day (Spot-4, 2200km swath) while JERS-1 has a much narrower 75km swath and takes 44 days to revisit. Some areas, especially the USA, appear to switch to aerial, as distinct from satellite, imaging at low heights (for example, New York City close-up images are from The Sanborn Map Company, Inc). With these images, you can actually see people on the city streets, even street light poles! You can’t quite see the leaves on the trees but you can certainly pick out branches . . . What does it cost? We have already mentioned that the basic version of Google Earth is, at least currently, a free download. But using it does have a cost! The price you pay is in the bandwidth you are paying for as you use it. And that can cost you plenty, depending on the particular broadband plan you are on. When talking to some friends about Google Earth, one made a comment about it being a “bandwidth muncher” and very costly to use. So I did some investigating on this line and, as they say in the classics, there is good news and bad news. We’ll start with the bad news. We mentioned earlier that the pages update “on the fly” using streaming technology. A general rule of thumb for streaming Just 150 feet above a bus stop in The Battery area (lower left of other pics). The clarity of view is sensational – one day it may all be this good! siliconchip.com.au video usage is about 2MB per minute. Using a downloaded shareware utility called Networx (www.softperfect.com) we monitored Google Earth usage and confirmed this to be about right: usually about 25-35KB per second, which does equate to roughly 2MB per minte. So if you were constantly using Google Earth for an hour, you could easily eat up 120MB of your allowed bandwidth – not very good if you’re on one of the cheapie 150MB or 200MB per month plans! But here’s where the good news comes in. Unless you are constantly changing positions or views, the streaming doesn’t continually occur. In fact, for significant periods of time, our usage meter was saying perhaps 1-5KB per second, an average of perhaps 100KB per minute: much more user (and wallet) friendly. The moral of the story is that like any streaming source, you should keep your eye on your usage. It’s easy to exceed your plan limits and some ISPs charge like wounded bulls once you do so. More Google Earth power? Google Earth is also available in two higher-featured versions, neither of which is free (but one is pretty cheap). Google Earth Plus is an optional upgrade adding GPS device support, the ability to import spreadsheets, drawing tools and better printing. It costs $US20.00. Further upmarket is a version for professional and commercial uses, Google Earth Pro. It is described as the ultimate research, presentation and collaboration tool for location information. Google Earth Pro makes location Hi, mum! One of those villas is her place on the Gold Coast. The images, from 450km away, are so clear I almost expected to see my mother standing in the front garden waving to the satellite . . . siliconchip.com.au What you need Google Earth itself is a free (and relatively small – around 10MB) download. You can find it on http://earth.google.com However, you’re going to need some reasonable firepower to run it. If your PC is, say, over four years old (even two years old in the case of many notebooks), forget it! The minimum hardware configuration is: * CPU speed: Intel® Pentium® PIII 500 MHz * System memory (RAM): 128MB * 200MB hard-disk space * 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 16MB VRAM * 1024x768, 32-bit true color screen * Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP Recommended configuration: * CPU speed: Intel® Pentium® P4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+ * System memory (RAM): 512MB * 2GB hard-disk space * 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 32MB VRAM or greater * 1280x1024, 32-bit true color screen * Operating system: Windows XP Internet Connection As we said earlier in the article, Google Earth downloads its image data as you go to that location (it’s called “streaming”). A broadband connection is essential – preferably a fast one. Minimum speed for practical use would be 128kbps but you will get much more satisfactory results with a 768kbps – or even faster – broadband (ADSL/Cable/Wireless) connection. research and presentation easy. Google Earth Pro costs $US400 but there is a 7-day free trial offer to find out if it is what you need or want. Google Earth Pro itself has a number of add-on modules, each priced at $US200 – Movie Making Module; Premium Printing Module; GIS Data Importing Module; GDT Traffic Counts Data; and NRB Shopping Centre Data. You’ll find more information about these modules on http://earth.google. com/earth_pro.html along with a lot more information about Google Earth itself. How does Google Earth make money? I cannot believe the number of people who have said “if it’s a free download, how does Google make money?” Google Earth is more or less an extension of Google’s search engine technology. Just as restaurants currently pay to advertise in the media, they will pay (and already are paying) to have their name – and location – come up on Google Earth when you are looking for somewhere to eat in that area (again, check out New York City). That’s just one example. Google rates are low by comparison to other forms of media – as a global organisation they don’t have to charge much because the market is so huge – and growing. And finally, you may have heard recently reports that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently knocked back an offer of $3 billion from News Ltd. Is there money in Googling? We think there might be a few cents here and there. . . SC October 2005  13