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Yougle Earth

For New Yorkers
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I love Google Earth and, like everybody, the first thing I do is to zoom in on my house. I also like the way that the images are more- or-less seamlessly stitched, so that I can zoom from outer space to my back garden.

What I'd like is a piece of software - or an extension to Google Earth - that gives me an extreme fisheye view. In the middle, at maximum resolution and filling perhaps a third of the screen, would be my house (or any chosen target). At the periphery, it would be more compressed and at lower resolution. Around it, in less detail, would be my village. Around that, in still less detail, Cambridge and its environs, then the rest of the British Isles compressed into a band maybe an inch wide, then a tiny Europe, and a minuscule rest-of- the-world.

In other words, a seamless composite in which the scale decreases smoothly from the centre outward, not unlike the famous "New Yorker" cover (see link).

Ideally, the software should also generate a high-resolution downloadable image file that I could print, and should accept uploads (for example, an aerial photo of my house) to augment the detail in the centremost part of the picture.

MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 06 2009

(?) Sort of like this... http://graphicsopti...tion.com/blog/?p=28
..but photographic. [MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 06 2009]

Max, your first link is dead now https://www.google....PU-yrGauB7Qb5k4DAAQ
[pashute, Jul 23 2014]


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       This sort of centre-weighted magnification view would look cool, and also would be useful for displaying the maps on sat-nav displays.
hippo, Jan 06 2009
  

       I would just like to state, for the record, that I do not immediately zoom in on [MB]'s house when on Google Earth.
Visualisation of this idea is good, provided you could get the extremities in a good enough resolution for meaningful navigation.
gnomethang, Jan 06 2009
  

       It's not so much for navigation, more for art (hence the desire for a printable file). I think the periphery would be limited by the printer resolution, and the centre by the original image resolution.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 06 2009
  

       Nearly always - essentially this is a map where the scale of the map increases exponentially with the distance from the centre of the map. So, at the edge of the map the scale is large enough to include the entire known universe. As Cambridge is within the known universe, it will always appear on the map. The only times it will not appear on the "periphery" of the map is when it is chosen as the centre of the map - although as we are blessed with redundant Cambridges (e.g. Cambridge, Mass.) it is axiomatic of this mapping technique that there will always be a Cambridge on the periphery of the map.
hippo, Jan 06 2009
  

       It doesn't have the fisheye view, but Google Earth does have the capability described in the last paragraph. You can take maps and aerial photos and lay them on top of the existing photos for a better view.
krelnik, Jan 06 2009
  

       //Why is Google Earth so compelling?//
<cautiously, wary of being suckered into a bad Christmas cracker pun> I don't know [UB], why is Google Earth so compelling? </cwobsiabccp>
coprocephalous, Jan 07 2009
  

       I like this concept - got my vote. Although I don't see any real practical applications, it would be neat. The only problem is, you wouldn't be able to accomplish it from satellite, so how would you do it?
Brightshadow, Jan 08 2009
  

       The idea is to use the existing images that Google Earth uses; the processing of them to acheive this extreme fish- eye look should be fairly easy.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 08 2009
  

       I swore off Google Earth when I found that it would not let me look at the heads on Easter Island. If you can't do that, what's the point?
bungston, Jan 09 2009
  


 

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