Perusing Google Earth’s quilt of aerial images is good for hours of stalkerish fun (Find your house! Find your ex’s house!). But every now and then, Google's geo toy can also bend the fabric of reality—literally:
Get ready for a bumpy ride!
Artist and programmer Clement Valla
has discovered 60 strange, beautiful scenes
where Google Earth’s mapping has gone awry, as you may have seen in a post on Boing Boing
. So what's really happening in these pictures? Here’s Valla's explanation:
The images are the result of mapping a 2-dimensional image onto a 3-dimensional surface. Basically, the satellite images are flat representations in which you only see the topmost object—in this case you see the bridge, and not the landmass or water below the bridge. However, the 3D models in Google Earth contain only the information for the terrain--the landmass or the bottom of the ocean. When the flat ...
