Google Earth 4.3 is an incremental update with new features and some pretty cool new data as well. This is NOT a major new version, however, there are some significant new features.
- There are new day/night lighting effects. You can turn on a real-time sunlight which shines on the new atmospheric lighting Google has added. The new sun icon in the upper middle (next to the new Sky button) will enable this function. Once it loads, you will see the current position of the sun. With the time slider you can change the sun over the course of a whole day so you can see the sun from sunrise to sunrise. Note that the lighting effects the atmosphere, so you actually get color changes near the horizon, and on clouds (if you turn on the Weather->Clouds layer).
- Now also Street Views (normally you see gold camera icons) are included in Google Earth. You click on a sphere and you enter inside and can look around (or double-click a camera icon). You can then double-click on camera icons to be flown to other views (from within the sphere). This is done through the GE Photo Viewer interface, and works pretty well. Turn on the Street View layer to see the icons, and then fly to a city with the icons to see them up close.
[via GoogleEarth Blog]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
