Google Earth With Street View

Street View is a feature in Google Earth and Google Maps, wherein the user is allowed to view collected imagery at street-level anywhere that Google has traversed. Street View can place you right in the middle of the street where you can literally see for yourself in case you are unsure of which side of the street an address is on. It is therefore a helpful feature which is quite an adventure since it is a lot of fun to walk through an area of a city in which you’ve never been, thereby providing a digital sight-seeing tour.

This portable application for Windows, Linux, and Mac is said to expand the capabilities of  Street View, to the point that you can somewhat walk in, out, and around the point of interest, although it is not a perfect 3D replication. It is said to increase or decrease the polygon count where you can almost remove all the cars or people, thereby creating a fantastic effect as you stroll through an empty street.

Key Features:

•  Vertical accuracy – the banding effect is excluded when textures do not line up, thereby increasing or decreasing the number of polygons in the vertical direction
•  Horizontal accuracy – the number of polygons are increased in the horizontal direction, whereas the lower settings can increase speed, besides making the depth of smaller objects indistinguishable from the background
•  Detail level – the resolution can be set at which images can be easily downloaded from the Google server. Each additional level takes 4 times as long to download and takes up 4 times as much disk space in cache. Level 1 is ideal for just racing around town while Level 3 can be used to study all the details.
•  Mipmapping – Enables texture smoothing of faraway polygons or polygons looked at from a grazing angle, apart from dramatically increasing texture load times resulting in an annoying wait every time a new panorama comes into view.
• Wireframe – an estimate of the amount of polygons being pushed by this feature, providing a great way to visualize the effects of the accuracy settings.

GO4