I’ve been knocking myself out with Google Earth recently. I found the activity of looking for some location from a generally “uncharted” map of the Philippines (it only goes as far as showing major cities) very engaging.
Still, there are some misgivings I have with it. First is the free version doesn’t allow you to draw polygons. I could understand why the Plus and Pro versions give you better network access, which is fair enough. But drawing custom shapes/polygons can be done locally in a machine, I wish they just enable it on the free version as well. Having the ability to input custom shapes to draw area perimeters is very useful especially in the Philippine context – because we have lousy Civil Engineers who make me wish there was some kind of SIM City feature in real life to just obliterate a chunk of area and replace it with properly distributed structures and roads. But I digress.
Back to Google Earth, one irksome fact is that they seem to favor more developed countries as far as maximum zoom resolution goes. For example, the picture on the right is a shot of the La Salle Greenhills gymnasium taken at an altitude of 300 meters. Notice how soft that is, I don’t know if the urban pollution we generally have has something to do with it, but it’s disconcerting when I start comparing it to this picture of a portion of the Google campus taken at 40 meters:
Forty meters and it’s still pretty clear. You can see the seats for Chrissake! I checked other european countries and they are similar – you can see people and cars.
Now I know that they take their images from some other provider, and if that provider happens to be european, then naturally one would expect the maps to be more up-to-date. I just wish they spend the time and at least try to update all satellite feeds to about a year tops. I don’t know how feasible that is, but I would imagine that while it would definitely take a considerable amount of time, I doubt it would take a ridiculous amount of years to complete it – if they really cared enough.
The real reason I [finally] decided to try Google Earth was to see how much damage Milenyo had caused. Obviously, I promptly found out how naive I was; the satellite images aren’t “up-to-date.” In fact, the Philippine imagery is so old that… well, see for yourself:
In case you haven’t noticed yet, that white road at the center of the image is what was to become the flyover connecting Libis and Katipunan! How many years ago was that!? Tiendesitas, SM Hypermart aren’t there yet. Oh and Taguig is still empty! Only the Wave and the Curve 1 Upscale residential condominiums which were probably one of the first structures to be installed in Taguig. were standing.
The flyover connecting Katipunan (Blue Ridge area) and Katipunan (Ateneo area) was already present though, so I just had some fun and traced an “old” route we used to pass through to school as kids 2 This was when the flyover wasn’t there yet.. Let’s see who can relate to this:
If you’re lost, feel free to click on the Flickr link via the lightbox for notes of the landmarks. I call this the “Escopa route.”