google earth 6

Google Earth has just released Google Earth 6 into its interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit foreign countries or scope out your next vacation spot with greater realism.

Google Earth 6 brings greater realism in two ways. It integrates Street View and 3D trees for the first time. It’s also easier to browse through historical images as well.

Google Earth has traditionally only allowed users to fly over spaces to view the landscape and surrounding features. With the introduction of a full integrated street view, you can journey from East to West in a fully integrated street view experience, no flying over necessary.

Google Earth 6 also includes dozens of beautifully detailed 3D models of different types of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia. Trees are being virtually “planted” in Google Earth, with more than 80 million already placed in many popular destinations. To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel.
The latest version of Google Earth makes it much easier to discover historical imagery. When you are searching in an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period.  From there, you can search through all the historical imagery available at that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view.
Google has posted a great video showing the new features on this release on their blog post announcing the news.
Have you tried out the new Google Earth? Let us know what you think of it in the comments below.

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  1. utn.mark at 1:28pm 5th December 2010 Just spent yesterday trying the new 6.0 Beta for 4 hours. Exceptional experience. Used the Movie option to make a tour of my property and surrounding areas. Lots of hilly areas there and the 3D terrain projection with it's fluid motion was truely awesome. It's like having a helicopter at your disposal with GPS mapping goggles on (and a sunny day to boot). Cons: Crashed repeatedly. Not quite ready for prime time. At least it prompted to send crash reports to Google for debugging. Help file needs more info for individual Options settings and expanded explanation of what they do. Movie mode doesn't have an option to display the mouse in the movie, so couldn't point to various areas during my narration. (Maybe there's a way to display a mouse pointer I didn't notice?) Can't save movie to disk as video file (though can save as a tour within Google Earth. Used Snagit's screen video capture mode to record the movies.
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