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Google Maps Terrain  (View post)

Anders [PersonRank 1]

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
16 years ago11,183 views

Sweet Maps updates: Looks like "Terrain" just replaced "Hybrid." This is mostly interesting to those of us who love geospatial data. The elevation looks like shadows. Also, the Satellite button now has a checkbox that pops up to "show labels." I see this at least for San Francisco and LA.

Also, search for a location and in the pop-up bubble, a Street View still image appears if there is Street View available for that location.

Keith Chan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Wow .. nice dig, Anders! It looks cool and I'm sure it would be a step forward in terms of modeling everything like buildings and stuff. Google is just good at maps (and search of course) :)

toml [PersonRank 6]

16 years ago #

nice

Reto Meier [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Holy jeebus. That's entirely too cool.

Above 4 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

andy [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

They seemed to have done away with the old pure satellite view. The new satellite view appears to be what hybrid view used to be.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

>> They seemed to have done away with the old pure satellite view.

Not if you uncheck the "Show labels" checkbox when you click the "Satellite" button.

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

like it very much. might use this instead of the normal maps view now.

if you could add 2 things to google maps, what would they be?

Stephan Locher [PersonRank 9]

16 years ago #

If graphicali possible it would be nice to have a hybrid view between terrain and satellite, shouldn't this be like a 3d view?

What possibilities are ther for developers trough the Maps API? Is it possible to read out data like the height of a hill or mountain for example? If yes there would be a lot of possible games...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Official blog post on this is live now:
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/11/explore-new-terrain.html

Keith Tyler [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Any idea what the different green shades indicate?

Henning [PersonRank 3]

16 years ago #

I cannot confirm any problems with not-loading map tiles (Arcor DSL, Germany).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Henning, this problem is not easy reproducable, even for me – it's more of a random (but constantly recurring) thing.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-07.html#n58

cheukiecfu [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

local live has time months ago.. it's called "hill shade" for them..

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

And here's the second official Google blog post on this now:
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/11/another-way-to-take-in-view.html

DPic [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Could Google offer a lot of different views for maps? Elevation, historical maps, etc?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

One thing that would be cool for starters is full support for KMZ/ KML files Right now, like on the recently announced Google Earth layer showing air pollution (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/11/breath-of-fresh-air.html), you get a "file too large" message when you try to layer the KMZ over Google Maps.

Pamela Fox [PersonRank 2]

16 years ago #

You can add physical maps to a Map API mashup via: GMap2.addMapType(G_PHYSICAL_MAP);

For elevation/contour info, browse the Google Maps directory for mapplets. There are a couple nifty ones that you could add to your tab.

http://maps.google.com/ig/directory?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&q=elevation&btnG=Search+Google+Maps+Content

Sure is pertty. :)

RC [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

nicely done. i been looking forward to this for a while.

if only they would add county boundary to the maps in US, it would be awesome.

Maps Googler [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Philipp, I don't know how far you investigated this tiles not loading problem, but could you please check your home router logs, and disable any firewall or outbound synflood protection it may have?

I've been looking into a variety of missing tiles problems for some time now and when no tiles appear at all, like in your screenshot, it can be due to trigger-happy home routers.

We'd be interested to know if this helps at all.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Maps Googler, you can contact me at info[put at-character here]blogoscoped.com , I might be able to do some tests but you'll probably have to give me a couple of instructions. The only problem is that the tiles disappear so randomly that I won't be able to tell you "when I do X, it suddenly works", because it *already* works often. E..g right now, I visit maps.google.de like yesterday, and it's all displaying fine. I currently disabled Norton, but I also saw this problem appear on another computer which didn't have Norton...

alek [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

If you zoom in quite a ways with regular views, and then click terrain, it will zoom you back out to the highest res that view supports. Not really a bug per se, since you can only show stuff you have data for ... but might be nicer if the behavior is to save your zoom & pan position ... and just say "no data available at this level of detail" or something like that.

Cool stuff!

hebbet [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It's one of the best features in Google Maps

Serge [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Note that if you click on the street view link in a balloon the camera points exactly at the business front door if the marker was correctly edited by someone. Pretty cool.

Serge [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Street view front door pinpointing is also available for plain addresses. For example search for 55 Union St, San Francisco, CA 94111

geotrotter [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Here is some sights to see on Terrain view ... and the first bug :)
http://www.geo-trotter.com/cat-relief.php

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