Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston are singing the praises of EarthViewer, a software version of Neal Stephenson's Earth from Snow Crash — it's a browser for geoloc information whose interface is an Internet-updated 3D model of our beloved planet. I just had lunch today with Avi Bar-Zeev, a fine science fiction writer, an ex-Imagineer, and a programmer on EarthViewer. This is a remarkable piece of software, with a remarkable team of coders behind it.
What you get is a seamless, and I mean seamless, zooming and rotating of the world. As you zoom down to a resolution that lets you see individual houses and trees, a server streams the images from the Internet, with detail filling in (and being cached) in seconds. (One meter or better resolution in some cities, 15 meter for the entire USA, and at least 1 km for the rest of the world — you'll more likely subscribe if you live in or frequently visit one of the 1-meter cities…) Click a checkbox and street names overlay the images of the streets. Another click and you can locate Italian restaurants on your view or see city borders or zip code boundaries. Click another box and, when you "tilt" the view, mountains and hills stick up, with the aerial images texture-mapped onto them. "Bookmark" places to return quickly, or compare "push-pin" locations.
