Working of Google earth
You are already aware what wonders Google earth works for you. In this world around 200 million people have downloaded the Google earth. People in various government offices use it for their planning strategies. The common people use it to locate their favorite destinations. And people from a commercial background such as the builders use it for site analysis. But it must have made you curious as to how Google earth actually works? How are the images takes and how can the camera capture the smallest details? Is it really possible to converge the whole world and all its data in single software? Lets us see how this use tool works with the aid of a gigantic system. By having an idea of its functionality one can utilize this facility in a still better way.
When you zoom in to a particular location, it is only because of a technology called data transfer. Take for example you want image of the whole earth. If you are equipped with a 10-megabit-per-second Internet connection, the image will take about 70 years to appear on net just for one-meter resolution image. Just imagine how you would have worked with a 56k modem and waited for 12,400 years to see the same image. This data has to be reduced so as to improve the speed. Google earth adjusts the globe with a polygon. This polygon consists of a number of flat tiles. If you are watching it from a distance, you will need less number of tiles to see the round shape of the earth. One can lower the resolution of the tiles. Now just focus on the location of your choice. Each tile is subdivided into a number of tiles. Each of the newly formed tiles has a higher resolution than the parent tile and it changes the Polygons in round balls. This is called zooming in. Thus the high-resolution data is downloaded only then, when the user zooms in a particular location. Some times Google earth uses disk cached. This disk cache is in the hard drive and comprises all the locations visited by a viewer. Whenever a user wants to visit the same place the second time, he can just view it with the help of this disk cache. It can reproduce the data that is feed and displays it. Thus the image is in front of you in seconds. This also saves the time required for downloading the data and going through the same procedure again. Google earth is also useful to climate modellers. They used the tilling mechanism earlier but their workload has simplified and reduced due to Google earth. And the credit goes to the excellent software and also the big supercomputing platform of Google earth. The ratio between a completely zoomed map and the globe is 1:1. With the help of this mechanism, Google earth gives the map the appearance of a sphere. For excellent image quality, Google earth uses the VWorld technology.
Google earth, Google, technology, imagesTags: Google Earth
Technorati Tags: Google earth, Google, technology, images
