ABSTRACT
A decade has now passed since the release of Google Earth (GE) (Google Inc. 2005). It is hard to fully measure the impact it has had on all areas of society, as it opened possibilities in the world of remote sensing to everyone from the youngest student looking at satellite images for the ¦rst time to an experienced professor who was now able to access imagery at a scale and speed never before possible. In 2004 the technology that was to later become GE was called “EarthViewer” (Figure 28.1) and was the proprietary property of Keyhole Inc. It was one of several virtual globes (Bailey 2010), computer applications creating a 3D model of Earth or other planets that evolved in the early 2000s as technology caught up with ideas (Bailey and Chen 2011). For many they were seen as realization of a vision that had been laid out in di§erent forms by many from futurists (Fuller 1962) to academics (Bailey et al. 2012), to artists (Eames and Eames 1977) to science ¦ction writers (Stephenson 1992). However, many credit Al Gore’s 1998 address to the California Science Center (Gore 1998) as succinctly verbalizing the concept of a Digital Earth, of which GE ultimately became the most popular actualization.
