As I said last week, today would be released the Google Earth’s 5.0 new version, and although we analyze and speculate ( smoke ) something that would bring, it has left me impressed the functionality of viewing the historical archive of images that Google has risen since 2002 to date.
On the top bar appears an option to display historical images of the deployment area, and the dates where there are update are indicated. Just great, because before it was only possible to see the last image, leaving the previous hidden; I guess that it will continue the same in Google Maps.
The button on the right, which has a tool form, allows you to also set a continuous animation for a specified period, and also set the transition’s speed.
Let’s see an example of this:
The fact that I’m showing is a church, this is the last image updated in November 2008 with its new roof.
Now see the same church, in a 2002’s view, notice that the building with new roof is not yet built. Ah, with a slight difference of 52 meters between each shot.
In the following graph is marked the same building in different years’ shots. In general, the last four have about 9 meters of difference, only the first one is over 50 meters.
The usefulness of this Google Earth’s feature is very practical for many purposes, among which it can be considered:
- Urban growth
- Cadastral Planning and maintanance
- Planning for property reassessment
- Deforestation and environmental degradation
We will see the applications implementation that has been developed on the Google Earth API. Other new tricks for version 5.0 will be discussed later, among which there are Ocean and saving video. In the meantime, here is a video showing the images’ history.