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Google Earth live and in realtime
For years I've entertained a fantasy about air travel that I'm sure
many of you share. You're staring out the cabin window, watching the
landscape scroll tailward, and some feature catches your eye: a
building, a highway, a lake, a ridge. You touch the window and a
heads-up display fades into view. It's kind of like Google Earth, but
live and in realtime. You summon and dismiss layers of annotation, and
you bookmark locations for later study.
Some people, and Doc Searls appears to be one of the most talented
among them, have carefully enough studied the view from airplane
windows, and carefully enough studied maps, to be able to correlate
the two domains remarkably well. But most of us could use a little
help -- or, in my case, probably a lot of help.
Airplane windows that morph into heads-up displays aren't in the cards anytime
soon, I'm afraid. But it strikes me that we do have at our disposal
some tools that we might be able to use to cobble together at least a
first approximation of a solution.
Here, for example, is the list of ingredients for a recipe that I
can't try making right now, because I'm at 30,000 feet watching Texas
scroll tailward:
- A GPS breadcrumb trail representing my flight's route
- Timecodes for each breadcrumb
- Google Earth Pro
Can these ingredients be used to bake a screencast that would play in
realtime, would document the progress of your flight, and would label various
natural and manmade structures along the way? If anyone's tried this,
or tried a different approach, I'd be really curious to know how it
turned out.
When we do finally get those heads-up displays, connected to the
plane's flight systems and to the Internet, it'll be grand, won't it?
I wonder how the service will be priced. Will window seats command a
premium? At a flat-rate or per-minute? Adjusted for cloud cover?
Update: Drew Burton reports:
I tried something approaching the simplest form of your flight tracking just a month ago.
I had Microsoft Streets and Trips on my laptop with an attached GPS sensor. This is out-of-the box setup.
It reported elevation, flight speed, direction just fine.
I could zoom in and out as normal. It showed my ground location as I flew long. The application has the ability to leave a trail of where I had been.
I had been in a window seat; I attached the sensor to the window.
On the way back I was in a middle seat. From there my $99 sensor
picked up nothing.
In other words, he tried The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work,
and it did. I can't wait to try it.
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