Video: Swoop Through the Real New York as Google Earth Meets Google Street View
Google Earth has long allowed users to zoom in on textured, three-dimensional representations of cities, but the view was more or less limited to one angle: straight down. But the search giant has now mashed up its wealth of high-res Street View data with some existing city textures, making it possible to zoom right down to street level and take in a in 3-D.
What was once a kind of grainy, pixelated experience -- at least if you zoomed in really tight -- is now much more like the real deal. Building facades and architectural nuances are in focus, storefronts are legible, and landmarks can be explored in a far more realistic fashion than before. You could even argue that the ability to , experiencing them from both ground level and from their upper stories and beyond, beats pounding the pavement yourself.
Currently, the 3-D experience is limited to a smattering of international cities -- New York, Cape Town, London, etc. -- but more 3-D-enabled locales are surely on the way, as Google's mission is, after all, to catalog everything in the world. You can take a spin around NYC below.
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