I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.
So much for hiring “smart creatives” and supporting their work I guess…source: Introduction section of 2014’s “How Google Works” (I returned it to the library after that, I’m not going to hate-read stuff even if it would give me some insight into Eric Schmidt’s career)
This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project.
Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.
(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
This _was_ done a couple of decades ago, it was available on the downloadable version of google earth (when it existed). I remember playing around with it in 2012.
While this doesn't do anything to threaten MS flight simulator, it's still charming. Google Earth is a delight to experience in VR if you ever get the chance, and the flight sim mode is likewise.
I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.
> I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche.
Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.
There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
I think it was also a feature of the commercial version of Keyhole, which IIRC, Google bought and turned into Google Earth.
The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.
Took them long enough to add it to the web app too. Bit disappointing how lazy the implementation is though, you never fall out of the sky even with throttle at 0%. Making the most basic flight physics even ignoring aerodynamics really isn't that hard
I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.
Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.
(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
Grand Theft Auto is now doing it, but Google Earth would make sense to have a more realistic environment.
Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.
There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
Spent a long time as a kid doing so. I still use Google Earth "Pro" today, so much better than the webapp.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnX8DLmjkCA
The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.