Saturday, December 9, 2006 |
11:53 - Tilt your perspective
http://www.layoutscene.com/james-kim-path/index.html
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My brother sends along this page where someone has gathered Google Earth views of the route followed by the ill-fated James Kim, where the 3D and the overlaid roads provide a very vivid forensic tool. He notes:
It occurred to me that this may be the first case - since Google Earth has been in existence - where people really have been able to visualize something that can't be conveyed in the news story. It's kind of like the Chris McCandless story, but that part of Alaska isn't high-res enough to find the bus.
Having just finished reading Into The Wild, I can certainly relate. I read the entire thing in one day (while laid up with food poisoning from a burrito I ate on Monday with green onions on it), following the geography page by page in Google Earth, as one might imagine—not just Alaska (which was actually the area I already knew well enough that I barely needed to look at the map!), but all the travels through South Dakota, the Mexico coast, the Salton Sea, Bullhead City, Davis Gulch, Petersburg and the mountain the author climbed—all those weird places. Even that mountain in Colorado where Chris and his family once climbed... if you turn on the Google Earth Community layer, you'll find all the placemarks for everything they mention, including "The Keyhole". You get to that point in the story and put your eye right in that notch on the mountain and see exactly what they saw. It's to the point now where I can hardly imagine reading any story about a real place without following along with my aerial 3D view to see exactly what landmarks they're talking about.
What I find amazing is that nobody (but whoever put this page together) ever seems to tilt the view in Google Earth. I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Putting your eye at whatever elevation you want, and then looking at the hillsides horizontally? Of course, the Google Earth vs. Google Maps advantage isn't always so obvious to people in the Midwest, because it's pointless to tilt a flat plain...
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