Google Earth cool travel tool

I discovered an incredible new travel tool while I was having a tooth crowned recently.

My dentist and I were waiting for my gums to numb when he turned on his computer and asked, “Have you seen this?”

He clicked on an icon and up came Google Earth, which gives you a list of sites to visit for information on a topic and also displays almost any location on the planet in 3-D.

Google Earth accesses maps, satellite imagery and aerial photography taken in the last three years. That image can be manipulated using a variety of features: navigational controls for tilting, zooming in and out and moving left or right.

You’ll also find a distance calculator; line or route marker; overlay mechanisms that sandwich different images together; and ancillary video and print information from sources such as the National Park Service and the Discovery Channel.

My dentist knows my love of Paris, so he put the Eiffel Tower in the search panel. Suddenly, I saw the landmark from every direction, including above, as he played with the navigator.

Then he moved the cursor a fraction of an inch left and there was the Pont d’Iena leading over the River Seine from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero. I was just about to ask him to show me the street with my apartment when he started drilling.

I used to think MapQuest was cool, with its useful route-planning capabilities. But 3-D, content-rich Google Earth (www.googleearth.com) blew me through the roof.

With it, a traveler looking for a place to stay in most corners of the world can capture an image of a hotel’s street, along with nearby restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. It’s easy to see how far a hotel is from the airport, where beaches are and figure out the roadway system.

Like the general Google search engine (www.google.com), Google Earth was created in a Silicon Valley garage by a group of computer wizards who received $4.5 million from Sony to start the project in 2000. They called it Keyhole after the U.S. military’s spy satellite program.

Keyhole joined the Google family in July 2005 as Google Earth. Keyhole Chief Executive John Hanke said 100 million users launched the geo-browser in the year after it made its debut.

It covers the whole world with medium-resolution imagery and about 20 percent of the Earth’s land mass in high resolution, which gives users 1,500-foot aerial views of many big cities and geographical features.

To run Google Earth, certain computer specifications are required, including a 3-D graphics card. But there is no charge to download the application.

In little more than a year, Google Earth has proved its attractions to individual users. They spend long hours tinkering with it and access the Google Earth Community function to report what they find in its vast store of imagery: a ship on fire off Iceland, spreading oil spills, a scale model of a top-secret military installation in a disputed region between India and China.

Discoveries by average users are being reported on the Google Earth Blog ( www.gearthblog.com), started in August 2005 by Frank Taylor, a former NASA scientist. Taylor says more than 500,000 readers a month participate in the blog, which has no connection to Google besides its use of the company’s advertising program.

“Google Earth is remarkable, because people who use the application are getting access to imagery and other data that would previously have cost them millions,” Taylor said in an e-mail.

“It has a very intuitive browsing interface and features that make it possible to create and share content.”

When I told Hanke I was planning a trip to Nepal, he told me how to use Google Earth to get a preview of tourist sights in the Katmandu Valley, annotated by other users who have been there recently.

I also can prepare for hiking a path in the mountains by following the route virtually with Google Earth.

It’s mind-blowing. And to think I found out about it at the dentist.