Google has just unveiled Google Earth 6.0 beta, and it has some great new features in it! The three main features they’ve added are:
- Tighter integration with Street View
- 3D Trees
- Updated historical imagery system
New Street View is now similar to Google Maps – simply grabbing the Pegman from alongside of your navigation controls and roads will highlight blue where Street View imagery is available. Drop him on a road you’ll fly right down to Street View level.
In addition, the controls have tightened up, you can toggle between Street View and standard mode very easily. It’s smooth and it works well. Here’s a short video that shows the new Street View feature in action:
Google Earth 6 now includes over 80,000,000 3D trees in a variety of cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Athens, Tokyo and Berlin. In addition, they’ve build out some full forests in parts of Africa and Mexico.
For more on the new 3D trees, check out this short video:
The update to the historical imagery is a fairly minor change, but should get help make people much more aware of they imagery that’s available. Google has found that users are often unaware of the excellent historical imagery that is available, and this update should help remedy that issue.
When browsing a location, Google Earth will continue to show the imagery date in the lower-left corner, which is a great feature. Now, if historical imagery is available in your current view you’ll see a small icon appear that shows the date of the oldest available imagery. Here is a video that shows more about this new feature:
Download Google Earth 6 at earth.google.com.
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- Google Earth 6 Improves Street View, Historical Imagery, and Adds (Millions of) 3D Trees (readwriteweb.com)
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- Google Earth 6 launches, now with Street View (onsoftware.en.softonic.com)
- Google Earth 6: Here’s What’s New (mashable.com)
- Google Earth 6 adds 3-D trees, integrated Street View, to the mapping application (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
- Google Earth 6 Debuts (informationweek.com)
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- Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees (mt-soft.com.ar)
- Google Earth 6 Brings Integrated Street View And 3D Trees. Yes, Trees. 80 Million Of Them! (techcrunch.com)
- Google Earth 6 adds 3D trees, true Street View integration (geek.com)
- Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
- Google Earth 6 adds full Street View, 3D trees & more [Video] (slashgear.com)
