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| Just did some google earth flying over the break to test a new iMac at home. In the last 2-3 years the hardware did not become faster bit just more gorgeous and cheaper (this imac costed a bit more than half of the 27 inch bought in 2009). The new iMac with built in computer is way slimmer than any computer screen, I have owned. We bought a basic 21 inch with 2.9 Gig Intel Core i5. The machine includes a NVIDIA GeForce GT640M and 8 gig like the other iMac. The bottle neck is definitely the internet connection sucking in the data while flying as well as the cache size in google earth. The details of the buildings in google earth has considerably improved as you can see when comparing the 2009 movie with the one now in full screen Captioning was done with 1442x812 pixels in real time. |
| A google earth flight done on December 12 2009. Challenges are to fly through through the arches of the Boston Bunker hill bridge, the entrance arc in Boston, the bunker hill monument, between the poles of the air port tower. A nice challenges would be to fly a certain task in the shortest amount of time. Google could have a serious "game" potential here. To build a parcour, I have experimented with "poles" placed with google sketchup. The problem is that flying with google sketch-up objects in the neighborhood slows down things considerably, especially if the machine also records the flights. The textures of the Boston buildings have considerably improved since 2008. Unfortunately, even 8 Gig of memory on the iMac are not enough to prevent frequent texture swap. Google earth has a serious limit on cache (500 Meg memory, 2 Gig Disk) which leads to frequent texture memory loss. The background music for this clip is "Superman" by "Five for fighting" which I got from the soundtrack album of the movie "bandits". Here is a large screen frame of Boston. |
Its the time of the year again to do some Google earth flying.
The first movie shows additional improvement of the 3D building quality near Cambridge on Google earth
since last year. Also the mountain textures in Switzerland are nicer than a few years ago. The clips were
done on a 27 inch iMac (Intel i5). Its nice with a large screen with 2560x1440 pixels, but recording large frames in
real time also challenges the better hardware more: the recorded movies were 20 rsp 30 GBytes
initially before resizing.
I still used to have hard drives of this size a couple of years ago.
Here is a 2400x1200 pixel picture of Harvard.
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| Google earth is a wonderful benchmark to see, how technology evolves. To fly in google earth and to record it in the same time pushes consumer hardware to its limits. The Boston movie much further below on this page had been made in 2006 on an G4 iBook, the rheinfall flight (dec 2, 2006) on a Mac Mini. It had been in November 2006, when Google earth first introduced flight simulator features. The recent flight simulator (December 2008) disables to see 3D building but they show, when the user insists. The next 4 flights were recorded on December 24, 2008 on an iMac (3.06 GHz Intel Core 2, with 4 Gig of memory). Google earth has become more realistic and buildings got textured. For the following 4 movies, my iMac recorded Megapixel frames in real time. (see some original frames) The movies have been reduced for the web to a 400x310 pixel size. |
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Flight through Cambridge, MA, especially Harvard. Music: Bach fugue: Partita, 6. |
Flight over New York. Music: "New York, New York" song by Frank Sinatra. Source. |
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Flight over Zürich. Especially nice flight though the Grossmuenster. Music: Zuerich Lied by Markus Horvath. |
Flight over Boston. Music: Via Con me, by Paolo Conte, Source. |
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Here is an experiment, I made with self-made objects placed on the Harvard Science center
in google earth. The objects were made with google sketchup. See the
exhibit page for a multivariable calculus course. Remark added 2008: I liked the early flight simulator because it allowed to fly arbitrarily slowly. The newer implementations are more realistic and like real planes, one has to have a minimal speed in order not to stall the machine. The movie to the right could not be done with current google earth versions. |
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Added March 2009: Here is a clip made November 3, 2007 shown in a class
where a problem appeared with the Matterhorntheme. The movie was made on a
white apple ibook. |
Google Earth Flight simulator experiments 2006Early in November 2006, Google earth introduced the flight simulator option into the software. The example to the right shows Boston. This movie was done on a iBook G4 laptop mid December 2006. |
| Place | Link | Info |
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| Rheinfall | Google Video and page on rheinfall.com with photos. | Flight over Schaffhausen, Neuhausen, Flurlingen and Uhwiesen. This movie was done on a Intel Mac Mini (1.6 Gig Intel Core Duo with 1 Gig RAM), on December 2, 2006. Frames were recorded with Snapz Pro in real time. The Background song is Wuthering heights by Kate Bush (1978). |
| Zürich | Page on rheinfall.com with guide how to switch to "flight simulator mode. | Also near Zürich, the google maps are quite good. This is a short flight from the rheinfalls to the Zürich Üetliberg. The background song is from "Enya", a sound track of the movie "Gladiator". |
| An animation of 2005, when no flight simulator was available yet. This was recorded frame by frame grabbing screen pictures. |
