planty

Hey guys and girls, just had a look at the aus forum and someone was talking about google earth, its a free to download application that allows you to zoom in on any country, town village almost back garden, I've had a quick play and its a lot easier than NASA's version. Took about 4-5 minutes to download on broadband.

Excellent tool.

http://earth.google.com/

uk+kiwi

second that ..... and totally addictive! but what a great way to 'see' where our globally sprawling family live!

bookemjano

Nigel, that's brilliant! We all love it here, though I did feel extremely seasick with all the movement!

Franklin

Does "it" really require a 3D graphic card? I have a P4 Dell with bags of disc space and 2 gigs of memory, plus broadband (actually a share of a T1 line, least I think that was what the technician said).

planty

Sorry not being a Tech head, got no idea.

by nature of the beast I would probably guess you do.

Imagine your sat on a satellite in space looking at mother Earth, you can either type in a place name and country and click go, watch as the Earth rotates and finds the exact place, then zooms right in to that position. From there you can zoom in closer, some places you can zoom in so close you can see the cars and buses. Look at the Arch De Triumph in Paris. If you don't want to type, just grab a hold of Earth and just give it a jolly good spin in any direction, zoom in and out, put filter layers in to search for specific items.

I haven't had much of a play yet, but from what I've seen so far, it's a fantastic learning tool, so simple even the kids could use it, and that's got to be a winner.

I would download it and see if it works, if it doesn't you can always dump it!!!

Debs70

Thanks for this, it's excellent.. we had loads of fun with it lastnight (my son was very impressed) we managed to see our house here in Manchester, but struggled with our old house in NZ.. I don't think it works as well with countries other than the UK, Canada and the USA (the US being the best of the three).

Sega Mad

I loaded it up last night on our laptop and it works fine.

I reckon yours should be Okay Franklin. It doesn't hurt to give it a go. I have noticed that the higher resolution images are only available for certain urban areas. I tried to see my back garden but only managed to see the park over the road. Couldn't see my cat at all!!! (maybe he was inside when the satellite went over.) If we knew when the images get refreshed we could spell out greetings messages with cars in car parks. Hmmm That could be a copyright idea eh??

Regards

uk+kiwi

Hi Debs,

We have the reverse issue - Uk house in a blurry zone, but North Shore Auckland - fantastic! We're currently using it in an attempt to find potential plots of land 12 000 miles away! How cool is that

Debs70

Oh right then!! maybe I didn't do it properly I was maybe a bit impatient because NZ was the first place I tried and by the time I got to try Manchester I was getting the hang of it.

Reall impressive the way it whizzes round to different countries eh? technology nowadays!! wonder what else it can be used for apart from just looking.

Pompey_Paul

Some of the more SENSITIVE areas cannot be seen also.......but them are the days we live in.........

bookemjano

Seeing on screen the distance between mine and my mother in law's house get wider as we fly away .......

Franklin

Thanks planty and Sega Mad. I will give it a boost! Will download it tonight so I don't clog up the local intra/internet at my office.

Pinkie Pie

Debs, I'll pm you my postcode and then I'll run out into our back garden and wave at you

p.s. I can't get it to work at all... I am such a technophobe...never mind, another 3 weeks and I'll have got the hang of it!!!

Debs70

Well I still can't get it to zoom in on streets in NZ it just goes all blurred once I get in close... but I guess I'm doing better than you Caz!

Pinkie Pie

Don't you want me to wave at you then????.....

And you know I'm no good at the technical stuff Debs...it's like mental torture for me....