Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
may have envisioned the page as a window into another world, but today's maps liter-
ally act like windows, not pictures: we peer into them. We can scroll them and rotate and
zoomthem. Wecanswitch them fromroadmapstoterrain mapsandbackagain oroverlay
them onto jewel-like, cloudless photographs of our planet from space. Perhaps they even
movewhenwedoorshowusnearbyfriendstraipsingacrosstheminrealtime,achildren's
fantasyideawhenitappeared inaHarryPotter topic justadecade agobutnowacommon-
place reality. It will take a generational shift to complete this definitional shift—after all,
my Pictionary doodle of the word “telephone” still has a twisty receiver cord and maybe
evenarotarydial,tothebewildermentofmycellphone-drawingchildren—butthechange
is well under way. For better or for worse, maps aren't what they used to be.
AndCarrollandBorgeswouldbeflabbergastedtoseethatthebiggestgamechangerhas
been an actual implementation of their impossible life-sized map. Geobrowser globes like
NASA's World Wind and Microsoft's Bing Maps platform may be virtual, not life-sized,
but their aim is the same as “Mein Herr's”: to represent an entire territory—the whole
world, in fact—in exhaustive one-to-one detail, without any of the selective simplification
of paper maps. In many ways, these globes now contain
more
data than you could glean
from the actual world with just a measuring stick or a camera. (Even the paradox-loving
Lewis Carroll never proposed a map twice as exhaustive as the territory it depicted!)
Google Earth wasn't the first virtual globe, but it's certainly the industry leader now,
with more than 700 million installations worldwide. It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to be-
lieve that the technology began life as a lowly video-game demo. In 1996, some Silicon
Graphics engineers were looking for a way to show off the new texture-rendering abilities
of their company's quarter-million-dollar workstations. Inspired by the famous 1968 short
film
Powers of Ten,
which depicts the Earth at scales from the galactic to the microscopic,
they produced “Space-to-Your-Face,” a flyover demo in which the viewer zoomed down
from a high Earth orbit to find a Nintendo 64 sitting on a pedestal atop the Matterhorn,
with an SGI graphics chip inside. Three years later, Chris Tanner showed the video to
Brian McClendon; both were part of a group of engineers who had left SGI to found their
own game technology start-up, called Intrinsic Graphics. “The day I saw it,” remembers
McClendon, now vice president of engineering for Google Geo, “I said, 'We should start a
separate company to do this.' The problem was, we weren't funded yet for the first com-
pany!”
As soon as Intrinsic had funding for its game library, the founders did spin off a new
company,calledKeyhole,tofocusongeographicapplicationsoftheir3-Dtechnology.The
post-Internet-bubble period was a terrible time to found a start-up, so Keyhole told poten-
tial investors it was working on a tool for the real estate and travel industries, a way to let
clients preview a property before renting. In reality, though, the Keyhole team knew what
was compelling about its new product, and it wasn't beach condos. It was leaping through
the stratosphere like a Mercury astronaut, like the boy with the seven-league boots from
