Celestia Forums

Slightly off-topic but whatcha gonna do?
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=earthviewer
Just noticed an advert for this. It's an Earth you can zoom into from satellite (and I mean Landsat style, not spy satellite) photo level all the way down to aerial photo level. I'll try it, but it suggests a 128kbs connection, and I just have a lowly 56k. Oh well...

Klingon - "I can see my house from here!"

Wow! That's the coolest thing since Celestia to hog my video card's memory Glad I have a cable modem though. I can see the building I work in!

Thanks for the link.

guest wrote:Wow! That's the coolest thing since Celestia to hog my video card's memory Glad I have a cable modem though. I can see the building I work in!

Thanks for the link.

do you see yourself ?
unless it is possible i will not pay for it.

I used to play with something like it at work...Its quite fun trying to find your house in there...

Also I wonder if this is one big texture or just the illusion that its one...amazing to see that in Celestia! Poor us trying to make the detail though...To make one of Mars or the Moon would take a while...

People are barely-resolvable blobs at the one-to-two pixel level -- you can only tell that some of the blobs are people because they're at the right places (e.g. sunning on Miami and Waikiki Beach).

It's most definitely not a single texture, but the switch from satellite to high-res satellite to aerial photo is done very smoothly. Still, from space you can easily see the edges of the building/car-res textures, as they've made no attempt to match the palettes. Also, you can see the topography "form" as the 3D mesh is downloaded and mountains grow in texture. I zoomed in on Bear Mountain, near Boulder, and watched it sprout up Even individual trees are visible (where they are sparse) on the mountainside.

It's disappointing to go from a region with aerial-photo res, to one with much coarser res. But even at the coarsest resolution, you can make out features -- when I zoom into Kerguelen, an island in the south Indian Ocean off Antarctica, it occupies about 100 by 100 pixels (eyeball estimate).

Well, I wasn't too impressed. I have no idea why the textures take so long to download on a 56k modem. The textures are horrible until you get down to individual building level, and then it's not too amazing. And i'm annoyed at the lack of detail for most places. London is mostly fuzzy grey, but, lucky us, the area around Blackfrier's Station (you know, the weird one that sticks out onto the thames) is in full color, but you can't actually see anything.
It'd be quicker to go on a aerial photo website. I don't know whether if you wait long enough it'll download some higher-res textures, but it didn't work for me.
And why on Earth (no pun intended) would you want to pay for it? If it was in Celestia, with all textures stored locally, I'd probably like it more. Well, if I had broadband i'll probably like it more, but ?30 a month? Get out of here...