Google Earth In 4D

Rockgod writes to tell us about Google Earth's latest expansion. From the article: "Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today." I suppose a link to Earth4 would have been good.

Pangea?

Where's pangea? Come on Google... get with the program.

Shows how old those damn satellites must be :-)

It's going to be interesting how the usual historical inaccuracies are dealt with, including moving river deltas and/or later removal of objects such as the British Echelon site, Menwith Hill :-)

Hey, Christopher!

It turns out we can't get to India that way. Whew, thank goodness we didn't waste an insanely long and difficult journey just to come back and look stupid in front of Queen Isabella.

well

wow, the dev team for google sure must be having fun, i mean come on, when you PAID to make new features when ever you want, no wonder working for google is a prized job (I'm only 10, if my grammer is bad, well oh well)

today's maps will be historical

I was thinking the other day about this. As new photos become available on Google Earth, the old ones will be removed... or pushed back in time, just like a CVS repository. A hundred years from now, you'd be able to walk the repository backwards and watch the suburbs shrink, the global waters recede, the forests regrow and the ice shelves stitch themselves together. (No guarantees expressed or implied.) Of course, Google would be one of those stodgy old companies that you wonder why they didn't implode in the nanostock scandals of 2065, but I digress.

Re:today's maps will be historical

The "darkness" of the dark ages is severely exaggerated. True, the loss central power resulted in a lot of warring that had previously been confined to the outer frontiers of the empire, but most of the other "bad things" about it were equally present in roman society. The roman empire was not as enlightened and civilized a time as many seem to think. Their great strength was in military strategy and administration, but there was very little technological and philosophical progress (compared to its duration) from what the greeks already had. In fact the middle ages were much more productive in that department.

A link to Google Earth would have been useful

http://earth.google.com/earth4.html [google.com]

4th Spacial Dimension

I would have been more impressed if Google had been able to achieve the 4th spacial dimension.

Come on Google, I thought you guys were "innovators"

Re:4th Spacial Dimension

They couldn't. The 4th spacial dimension is encumbered with patent rights. Only Microsoft and/or Novell customers can use it.

Almost there

I am SO looking forward to Google Tesseract Beta!

So I can assume

Giant sea monsters populate places where no one visited?

OMG AMERICA IS SNAKES!

Medieval London here I come!

I can't wait to see what London really looked like in Medieval times, the satellite imagery back then must have been... wait a second, there's not going to be any satellite imagery for back then would there? Computers hadn't been invented so what would they store the pictures on?

Silly me.

Re:Medieval London here I come!

They may not have had satellite imagery, but many artists and painters were hired to draw maps and paintings of the city to precise scale in perspective view.

Here is a supersized scan of a medieval map [pitt.edu] of London from the 1600's. Using some projective texture mapping/morphing, it should be possible to place this map on top of the Google maps [google.com] of London.

Hah!

I tried to go back to 7000 BC, and didn't see anything. You scientist types can try to explain this one away, but we all know what it REALLY means.

Re:Hah!

Yeah. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was obscuring the camera as a practical joke on creationists.

huh !

They are taking over the world ...... :-O

Google and Wikipedia = sum of human knowledge

In the near future we will be using Web services for all human knowledge and culture.
    History, Geography, Government, Music, Literature, Research, Art, Education...

    We will all routinely wear earpieces and wrist displays and the words telephone, television, media, network will disappear just as the words {carriage} footman, {switchboard} operator and typist. George Orwell got so many, many things right in _1984_ especially Newspeak.

    A Brave New World, NOT! Just a routine upgraded world.

Now what would be really cool...

I wish Google Earth would add the ability to go really far back in time, and see what the Earth (probably) looked like in prehistoric times. Always wanted to watch the movement of the tectonic plates in fast forward on my own PC...

Great!

Indiana Jones can now look for lost cities from the comfort of his computer.

4D debate

Yes, but the surface of the Earth is a 2D manifold, a function of radius parameterized by two angles. So, this is only 3D.

I hate that I know that.

Not yet, but working on it.

Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by...
They are working on it... by using a unparalleled level of space-telescope technology and the ability to propel the vehicle way beyond the speed of light, the Google-scope will eventually outrace the 1000's of year old visible light from earth, turn tail and start receiving this historic visual information. And before you say "it will take light years to get the information back", two words my friend... "gravity waves".

A good application

I think this is a neat application of Google Mapping. Its nice seeing the API being used, as I'm a mapping fan on sites like http://www.grapheety.com and others. [grapheety.com]

Historical fun.

This would be a fun way for history teachers to teach. Imagine Google "Points of Interest":

Jack The Ripper victoms in olde London.
Ghangis Khan/Alexander the Great conquest & warpath
Marco Polo route to the East
Or my personal favorite; combine this data with the Geneology Project to map out the paths that early humans took out of Africa.

If it's not spatial it's not 4D

The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously. People who have no concept of the significance of a 4th dimension have grabbed hold of this concept and ride it into the ground.

Under the definition that time is a 4th dimension, Guild Wars, Quake, Morrowind, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2... they would all have the appearance of being a 4D games. Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.

Furthermore, spatial dimensions are interchangeable. Width/Height/Depth are all the same thing and only have meaning in relation to the others. Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions. You can't have an object composed of x, y, t and still have the same dimensions as an x, y, z object. (3ft x 3ft x 3s) doesn't mean the same thing as (3ft x 3ft x 3ft)

Things do not sound inherently cooler by calling them 4D. Web 2.0 has brought with it many things, but a 4th dimension is not one of them. I'd rant some more but my 4D microwave has finished cooking my 4D hotpocket, and I need to grab that sucker before the 4th dimension causes it to be misshapen with lost heat!

Re:If it's not spatial it's not 4D

While I agree that 4D is being used more as a buzzword than anything else, time is in fact considered as a fourth dimension in physics. You can look at special relativity [wikipedia.org] if you want to understand how time and the spatial dimensions can be "interchanged":

In the geometry of special relativity, a fourth dimension, time, is added, with units of c, so that the equation for the differential of distance becomes:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 - c^2 dt^2
If we wished to make the time coordinate look like the space coordinates, we could treat time as imaginary: x4 = ict . In this case the above equation becomes symmetric:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 + dx_4^2

Special relativity goes on to say that you can exchange time and spatial coordinates using the Lorentz transform, which preserves the length of the 4D position vector.

If the special relativity example seems too bizarre, just think in terms of locating an event. If I wanted you to come to my party, I would tell you 4 pieces of info - the x,y,z, and t coordinates of the party. Each of these degrees of freedom is a dimension.


What's much more annoying to me are the "4D" shows that are 3D plus some user interaction (getting water shot at you or something like this). That is a misuse of "4D".

Wrong

Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth

Google already had 3-D models of some major cities as an option you could turn on in Google Earth. This included models of most of the sky scrapers that would really pop out on a format like the streaming GIS system that Google Earth is.

Still Waiting

For the "Earth is Flat" Version. Oh, wait. maps.google.com

Silver Surfer?

http://www.4d.com/ [4d.com] ... Too obscure?

Chronoogle?

Wonder what they will call this feature?

When I first read the sub. title, I thought they had superimposed some kind of 4th spacial dimension on google earth, and was thinking, why the hell would you do that?

Interesting concept they have here, and going forward it will be much cooler now that we have satellites actually photographing the earth instead of reliance on a single explorer's math skills.

Ok, the scene is ripe - bring on the nukes! We can do before and after pictures now!

For something a little more like 4D

I'm underwhelmed by the actual article, since it's just a bunch of overlays of historical data. Google Earth has had these (at least for San Francisco) since the early betas of Google Earth 4.

More interesting, and more 4D (in that it gives you an actual slider you can play with) is Google Earth 4 Beta's timeline [gearthblog.com] feature. I was hoping the article would've been something along those lines (since I've been having lots of fun displaying aircraft tracking data in Google Earth with their timeline slider activated).

As in stephansmap.org

That'll fit nicely with stephansmap.org or the spacetimebrowser
at spacetimebrowser.org

Stephan :)

Pfft, wheres Atlantis

Now that would be amazing :)

Time, GIS and Virtual Globes

A shameless copy of a previous slashgeo.org story:
Time for Time in GIS
Christian Spanring links [spanring.eu] to a FOSS4G2006 open document presentation [foss4g2006.org] named It's About Time for Time [foss4g2006.org]. From the abstract: ""The weakness of current cartography is its poor representation of time. The surface of the earth is treated as a static thing." (Anselm Hook) [...] There are numerous experiments, but little solid support in tools or data structures for representing the 4th dimension (when we're still getting used to the 3rd dimension in GIS)." The time capabilities of GeoRSS and Google Earth are mentioned. Previous poll on time [slashgeo.org].

And why not another pertinent one?
Time Tracking Now Included in Google Earth 'Free'
All Points Blog links [allpointsblog.com] to a ZDNet article where we learn the time tracking tool in Google Earth Pro will now be available in Google Earth Free [zdnet.co.uk] (and GE Plus, of course!). From the article: "The feature in which a slider is used to scroll through time [...] now features a simplified interface. [...] showing how scientists, who had tracked the movements of a whale shark using GPS, had then mapped the creature's path using the application. Business uses could include fleet tracking or mapping the movements of transport infrastructure according to Google. Jones also described how the new version would enable users to track all of the geostationary satellites orbiting the earth." Ed Parsons was first [edparsons.com] to mention this news item.

Right direction for geek treasure hunters

It will be interesting to see how deep the level will go on towns; and if there
will be lots of cross-referenced historical metadata in the long run.

I've spent a lot of time at USGS libraries to find out information on historical
context for my metal detecting hobby, and I can see at least a few practical
applications for this.

Temporal Binoculars!

I think using tools like this to learn history, including geologic history, is wonderful. <shameless plug>Regarding examining the land around us, I wrote a while back about something similar - Temporal Binoculars. The gist is a computer with visual overlay (i.e., augmented reality) in a binocular form factor. It would have the usual controls, plus a time dial. Students and other curious humans could carry them about, look around, and learn about where they are. Throw in some flora and fauna simulations, and you've got a great platform for discussions and education. More at Temporal Binoculars [blogspot.com]</shameless plug>

Re:The fourth dimension has nothing to do with tim

> The fourth dimension has nothing to do with time. It's another plane that intersects X, Y, and Z.

Usually denoted "t"... :-)

Re:The fourth dimension has nothing to do with tim

So, which one is the third dimension? X, Y, or Z? The point is how many dimensions you are using, not the order they are in.