This is very cool. Roman Nurik of the Google Maps team has created a driving directions simulator for the Google Earth plug-in. With Roman's tool it is possible to enter your requested directions into the Google Earth browser plug-in and watch a car simulate driving the route. Check out the screen capture below.
My first thoughts on this are that you could use this to create virtual tours of any area on Earth or that you could add street view to this as well so that you could have a first-person view of the route.
Via: Google Geo Developers Blog
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Congratulations Roman, a brilliant, useful real-world plug-in. Not wishing to sound churlish, but it's only as good as Google's route-finding abilities, which if you base them on its ability to get around London, UK, leave a great deal to be desired...
ReplyDeleteWhat a cool plug-in. I would absolutely love to be able to plug in an actual street address and use it for simulaton of routes to and from a property we're looking to purchase. Would that be possible?
ReplyDeleteYes - all you need to do is enter your starting point and destination.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I forgot to add a link to the actual simulator. I've now added the link in the post above.