On 11/26/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 11/25/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote: One interesting thing to look at is just how much Google Earth screeshots differ from 1) World Wind screenshots; and 2) the real thing - from that location and angle.
That would be interesting, and I'd be happy to help, but I don't have access to World Wind (it's Windows-only, AFAIK). We could start with the five images which Bogdan Giusca cited to start this thread:
http://www.mcfly.org/coord/%7Blatitude%7D/%7Blongitude%7D will give you links to many of the raw tiles that are used by World Wind. The database of sources isn't complete yet, though, and pretty much none of the manipulation of the images done by World Wind is done by this script. The quality in areas of the US is sometimes quite good. See for instance http://www.mcfly.org/coord/33.684065/-117.792581
I really wish these images were better tagged, for instance with a lat/long and zoom level, or even better with a bounding rectangle.
Someone has already replaced this with a World Wind image. Since it covers a wide area, it's comparable.
This one's already tagged as a copyvio, and will be deleted in a few days. It's centered on lat/long 33.663065, -117.806551. If someone can make a 2000 foot (600 meter) wide World Wind screenshot centered on those coordinates, that would be a useful comparison.
http://www.mcfly.org/coord/33.663065/-117.806551 (http://ims.cr.usgs.gov/wmsconnector/com.esri.wms.Esrimap/USGS_EDC_Ortho_Urba...) Now, this is ZoomIt data. Is it declared to be public domain, or is someone claiming copyright? It's off the USGS website, FWIW.
BTW, the centering and framing could probably be tweaked a bit, I just made a quick link.
This is also a wide-scale image, so the World Wind data is likely to be comparable. It's about 300 miles / 480 km wide, centered on lat/long 8.90, 28.94.
http://www.mcfly.org/coord/8.90/28.94 looks very different. The zoom level is probably too high or too low. I really don't know enough about the feature I'm trying to show to do a good job of this one.
This one is pure map data, not satellite or aerial photography at all.
It's in the US, so it should be covered by the public domain Tiger/Line data. The data is available, among other places, from http://www.esri.com/data/download/census2000_tigerline/index.html
ESRI has freeware software to make maps from the data, and they don't claim a copyright on the resulting map. Otherwise, there are freeware packages out there to do it.
I'm not going to volunteer for this one right now :).
Anthony