I’ve just been paying with some of the new features of Google Earth 6 – Well, it is a Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n
The latest incarnation of the Google Earth application has a few interesting features that I hadn’t seen before, although I’m sure some of them were available in earlier versions.<\/p>\n
First up there’s 3D trees<\/strong>!\u00a0Google has ‘planted’ these in areas where trees appear in real life and the update includes highly detailed models for dozens of different species of trees. So far they’ve added\u00a080 million trees in Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo.<\/p>\n Street View<\/strong> is now integrated with the app and there is now a\u00a0historical imagery<\/strong> feature which makes it easier to know what dates are stored for the area you are visiting.\u00a0This feature was in Google Earth 5 but I’d never seen it before. It allows you to visually go back in time to see areas of the\u00a0world\u00a0as they were in the past. Clever stuff!<\/p>\n When you are looking at an area where historical imagery is available an icon will say what the oldest time period for that area is. Click on the date and users are instantly taken back in time to view imagery from that era. Here’s Westminster in 1945, Sept 1999 and \u00a0Dec. 2006<\/p>\n\n\t\t