Probably not the last post I will make about Google Earth/Maps/Local

[mmcirvin]

Aside from the GUI problems I talked about earlier, I think Google could probably make Earth a lot better just by following the rule "make it more like Google Maps". Ideally, Earth should just be Google Local Deluxe: an OpenGL version of Maps/Local with 3D terrain and more data overlays, but it isn't yet. Maybe it's hard just because they're working with the existing Keyhole codebase that wasn't invented there, but it strikes me that most of the major problems with Google Earth have already been solved by Google elsewhere.

For instance: Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't it odd that the driving-directions tour plays at a constant speed without interruptions (unless you hit the pause button)? You've got to ride along on that rail at constant speed even if the only information being imparted for the next twenty minutes is that you're still on I-93. You can speed it up for the next go-around, but then the wiggles on city streets at the ends of your journey are in ridiculous fast-forward motion.

The Google Local website eschews this tour model for driving directions entirely and makes you click on the links for details, but I like its inset mechanism that shows you the big picture and the geography of the turns simultaneously. Google Local for Mobile does have a directions-tour feature, but the limited controls on a cell phone forced them to make it good: instead of playing you a movie, it just has a "click to advance to the next waypoint" button that pans you there fast. I suppose it was designed so that you could use it riding shotgun*, but it'd be a sensible thing to have in Google Earth too.

Here's another one: acw mentioned the weird labeling of cities and other geographical features, which is apparently somehow adaptive but doesn't seem to be tuned correctly: often smallish towns' names don't show up until you're looking right at them at close range, which is useless. Street name labels are somewhat better, but there doesn't seem to be any effort to ensure that a given visible street's name is easy to see; often it'll be way off the visible screen area and you have to pan all over to find it. There are also some places, such as my old neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass., where it simply refuses to label many streets altogether, a trait disturbingly reminiscent of the local street signs.

Google Maps, on the other hand, handles town, feature and street labels so gracefully that the user usually doesn't have to think about it; every view just looks like a fairly well-designed map. (The label database also seems to be distinct from Google Earth's and considerably better-maintained.) Keeping the street names visible with a 3D view is inherently harder than with 2D; the paradigm seems to be that the labels are sort of like objects in the 3D space, and the program would have to keep shuffling them around. But with a modern desktop PC's CPU to throw at it, it still ought to be possible to do much better than Google Earth currently does without much effort. Back-projecting a perspective clipping volume onto what can be approximated as a plane (if you're close enough to the Earth to see individual city streets) is not that hard.

And, of course, there's the obvious absence of a pure Maps view, which ought to exist.


*Shotgun, I said. For the love of all that is holy, not with one hand on the wheel.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

We were struggling with the speed of the fly-along on the driving directions, too. Generally the fly-along speed is problematic -- either boringly "still on 95" slow, or so fast your stomach lurches and you feel like throwing up.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

My problem is with the search and twofold. I don't want businesses from where ever my view is, if I say Mount Saint Helens, I'd like Mount Saint Helens. Which brings me to my other problem, I think I should be able to put 'north pole' in the search and find the north pole, or any other geographic feature and mostly I get I-can't-find-its, it's very frustrating. (Though they have very very good and close shots of Mt. St. Helens, go find Portland, OR and go east up the Columbia, there's two volcanoes to the north and one to the south, the north-west one is Helens.)

I may just not be understanding how to do searches, but this is Google! I shouldn't have to learn!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That is actually a problem with Google Local as well. Since Google's fundamentally an advertising company, it revolves around the sort of geographic-yellow-pages search. (Even in the simple "search the map/fly to" mode, which is kind of weird. You'd think "find businesses" would be about finding businesses and "fly to" would emphasize geography, but that's not how it works.)