New version of Google Earth launched

Sharon

Sharon Gill

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17th April 2008

New navigation

The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.

More, faster 3D buildings

Version 4.3 includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, and thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. Google has significantly enhanced its approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve the performance and realism of 3D data.

Street View

The Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View allows people to easily find and plan activities relevant to a location.

Sunlight feature

This new addition allows the user to control the sun's location relative to the Earth.Zoom out to a view of the Earth to can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth, or zoom into a city to watch the sunrise and sunset.

Image acquisition date

Version 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows the date a given area of imagery was captured.

New languages

Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages: Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.