Google Earth Revamped With Integrated Street View

Google unveiled on Wednesday their latest version of Google Earth, which incorporates a more realistic, 3D model of the world. “Google Earth 4.3 adds more realistic, real-world data so users have more ways to discover and explore all the interesting features the world has to offer,” the company said in the announcement.

The new navigation system isn’t confusing anymore, Peter Birch, Product Manager of Google Earth said in a blog, and now includes a brand new zoom control and the “look” joystick. The “pan” joystick will allow users to follow the ground in a realistic manner, as if they were walking on it.

“We spent a lot of time rethinking how users interact with 3D data. We realized that when in outer space and far above the ground, you really want standard map-like controls that allow you to pan and zoom smoothly,” said Birch.”However, if you want to get down to the ground and check out a city street, you really want a street-level navigation mode like you’d typically find in a video game.”

Google Earth now also includes photo-realistic models for dozens of cities, including Tokyo, Munich or Boston, while they’ve also enhanced rendering 3D data for better performance and realism, the same blog notes.

The most important and highly expected feature, Street View, is also a part of Google Earth as of Wednesday, by using the PhotoOverlay feature in KML 2.2.

At the same time, Google improved its language feature to a total of 26 languages in Google Earth 4.3. The latest additions are: Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.