Poly9 FreeEarth: It's like Google Earth, but Flash-based, and slower

by Brad Linder May 14th 2008

We can't count the number of times we've wished we could embed an interactive globe on our web sites. That's probably because it's hard to figure out how to count to zero. But if you really want a Google Earth-like globe on your page, Poly9's got you covered. The company's FreeEarth bears a superficial resemblance to Google Earth or Microsoft's Virtual Earth. But unlike those applications, FreeEarth is Flash based and can be customized and added to pretty much any web site.

A handful of popular web visualizations are already built on FreeEarth, including Flickervision 3D an Twittervision 3D. Because the software is built in Flash, most web surfers will be able to interact with the globe by spinning it around or zooming in for city-level details without downloading any additional software.

But FreeEarth doesn't have the level of detail that you'll find in desktop applications like Google Earth or Virtual Earth. You can zoom in far enough to make out buildings, but only if you squint. And it takes much longer for FreeEarth to load new satellite imagery when you zoom in.

[via WebWare]

Tags: free-earth, google-earth, poly9, virtual-earh

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

zkam said 4:49PM on 5-14-2008

I guess this won't help for the purposes of embedding on a page, but check out FlashEarth if you just want to browse the world without installing any software.

http://www.flashearth.com/

Jeebus said 1:05PM on 5-16-2008

Didn't work. It wants me to install Flash.

Greg Sadetsky said 8:18AM on 5-15-2008

Thanks for the review of our product!

You're correct that we don't offer as much free comprehensive satellite imagery – you'll only get high resolution imagery for U.S. cities – nor the rendering speed of Google Earth or Virtual Earth.

However, a part from the obvious difference is working on the Web, and being a 300 kilobyte application, our 3D globe can be connected to any satellite imagery data source; it is quite easy to have FreeEarth use imagery streamed from a web server, up to any resolution (as long as you have data, we can show it).

Regarding speed, we're definitely lagging behind desktop software, which can make use of graphic hardware acceleration (e.g. OpenGL / DirectX). We're hopeful that time is on our side. The latest 4-5 versions of the Flash plugin have already brought significant speed improvements.

The better is yet to come!

Cheers

Greg Sadetsky, CEO
Poly9 Group

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