Fun fact: you can also generate 3D buildings in Google Earth: <a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/earth/generate-designs" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/earth/gener...</a><p>I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.
Cool, I'll have to try it in the next 18 months before they turn it down.
Unfortunately, whoever did the controls for this doesn't understand how airplanes work.
This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project.<p>Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.<p>(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
This _was_ done a couple of decades ago, it was available on the downloadable version of google earth (when it existed). I remember playing around with it in 2012.
A lot of vibe coders and software engineers have created similar projects using the Google Maps 3D tiles API.
While this doesn't do anything to threaten MS flight simulator, it's still charming. Google Earth is a delight to experience in VR if you ever get the chance, and the flight sim mode is likewise.
I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.
High development and/or maintenance cost, low profit.
What would be the point?
> I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche.<p>Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.<p>There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
Fun fact: you can fly through the entirety of the Great Wall of China!<p>Spent a long time as a kid doing so. I still use Google Earth "Pro" today, so much better than the webapp.
Am I tripping or was this in Google Earth ages ago? I distinctly remember flying SU-27 on Google Earth map like a decade or more ago.
I think it was also a feature of the commercial version of Keyhole, which IIRC, Google bought and turned into Google Earth.<p>The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.
Took them long enough to add it to the web app too. Bit disappointing how lazy the implementation is though, you never fall out of the sky even with throttle at 0%. Making the most basic flight physics even ignoring aerodynamics really isn't that hard
Another nail to Xbox (MS game studios) coffin :)
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