Summary
- Google Earth is an essential app for exploring our planet and outer space, now with new community features and creation tools for custom maps.
- Mobile users will soon be able to create maps from their smartphones and tablets, with Android and iOS app updates rolling out progressively over the next week.
- The new update focuses on the ease of sharing geospatial data, making it simpler for users to create and organize data, recognize new images, and share them.
Google Earth is one rare app we didn’t know we needed. It’s designed to give the curious among us a detailed look at the planet and outer space, and it works seamlessly on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge — perfect for binge-watching the fascinating, immersive views of our planet from above. You don’t have to splurge on this one to get started, even one of the cheapest Chromebooks would do. Now, Google is making its 3D cartography tool even better with new community features, on the web as well as mobile.
In its 18-year journey of greatness, the app has undergone a series of ramp-ups to enhance its robustness. In yet another feature addition, Google announced a landmark update to “facilitate easier collaboration and enhance user experience.” The update equips users, regardless of technology literacy level, with creation tools to make and share custom maps across web and mobile platforms.
Perhaps the biggest news here is the fact that mobile users will soon be able to create maps from their smartphones and tablets. Google says the updated Android and iOS apps with these capabilities will become available progressively through the next week.
Beyond that, the new update focuses on the ease of sharing geospatial data, which is in season since most companies have migrated most of their data to the cloud. Google Earth’s new version works like a Google Doc, now featuring KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files. Through this, mobile and web users can now seamlessly create and organize geospatial data and share it. The new creation tool can also recognize new images captured by a mobile or tablet camera, process them, and share them.
Students, weather enthusiasts, and other users with a curiosity for life and their surroundings have essential global satellite image catalogs at their disposal. This is even more important as the world faces a rollercoaster of climatic changes and weather conditions. Hence, Google Earth’s continued development is instrumental for a world where anyone can learn and protect themselves from impending climatic or weather adversities.
If you’re wondering how you’ll get started, the tech company has provided a short tutorial that should help you understand everything from scratch. The website claims there are no programming skills needed, so don’t back down if things start to get a little complicated. Plus, there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to interesting things found on Google Earth, so you’ll have a place to share fun finds!
In the announcement, Google proclaimed that the new feature is just a start for a “series of enhancements.” The new developments are meant to move Google Earth from the “elite” class to make it more accessible and relevant to novice users. On that front, the company is also enhancing Google Earth’s responsiveness to help on low-powered devices.
link