Google and Keyhole

Very seldom do I find a piece of software that can keep me occupied for more than ten minutes (aside from dev tools). Anyway, a friend pointed me towards Keyhole and I was blown away. Keyhole was aquired by Google late last month and if you download a free 7-day trial you’ll understand why. This software is amazing!

If you’re into mapping then this is mapping to the 100^th degree. You have the ability to pan, zoom, and even tilt (although you’re tilting a 2D image). The interface displays satellite and aerial photography from all over the world. In some cases the imagery is very basic but in major cities like Dallas and Las Vegas you can zoom all the way in to see what’s on a billboard, it’s truly crazy.

Let me give you an example of how it works. Once you’ve started the program you get an image of the earth. You type in a location and the program starts to zoom into the continent, state, city, and finally address. I can’t begin to describe how tight the transitions are and I recommend you download it to get the full effect. So I typed in my college address – The Citadel, in Charleston, SC. You’ll see screens of the results below (click on any image for a larger view):

You’ll see in the final image (bottom right) the campus and even the barracks (2nd Batallion) we roomed in. Look at Jones Ave and you should see a big rectangular building. If you look close enough you’ll see that they’re doing construction at the time the image was taken.