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- Hacker News
- It's a fun toy program but calling this a flight simulator is doing a disservice to the communities and efforts putting in an immense amount of work to make actual flight simulators.
- lovely, but needs sound and an altimeter. i went flying over NZ, the controls got really laggy, hence the chaotic experience...by willguest
- I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.by thimabi
- What would be the point?by tantalor
- High development and/or maintenance cost, low profit.by kamil55555
- > I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche.
Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.
There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
by mschuster91 - This is wonderful. It would be cool if I could take off from an airport. Maybe I search an airport, and with that one "selected in search results", choose "Tools > Flight Simulator" and it starts me from the ground.by butlike
- Fun fact: you can fly through the entirety of the Great Wall of China!
Spent a long time as a kid doing so. I still use Google Earth "Pro" today, so much better than the webapp.
by simondanerd - Cool, I'll have to try it in the next 18 months before they turn it down.by rivetfasten
- This already existed ten years ago in the desktop version, not sure if it also was in the web version all the time.by danbruc
- It's been around since 2007.by rafram
- Am I tripping or was this in Google Earth ages ago? I distinctly remember flying SU-27 on Google Earth map like a decade or more ago.by smashah
- Yes it was. And probably still is.by zymhan
- It’s only new for the web version (but this seems way worse than the one in the desktop version, sadly)by circuit10
- It was, tutorial video from 2015 [1].by danbruc
- I think it was also a feature of the commercial version of Keyhole, which IIRC, Google bought and turned into Google Earth.
The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.
by reaperducer - While this doesn't do anything to threaten MS flight simulator, it's still charming. Google Earth is a delight to experience in VR if you ever get the chance, and the flight sim mode is likewise.by gacgacgac
- I'm pretty surprised they brought something fun and charming forward instead of sending it to the graveyard.by sco1
- Unfortunately, whoever did the controls for this doesn't understand how airplanes work.by modeless
- So much for hiring “smart creatives” and supporting their work I guess…source: Introduction section of 2014’s “How Google Works” (I returned it to the library after that, I’m not going to hate-read stuff even if it would give me some insight into Eric Schmidt’s career)by 6stringmerc
- Controls work normally for me on a desktopby petee
- This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project.
Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.
(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
by neilv - A lot of vibe coders and software engineers have created similar projects using the Google Maps 3D tiles API.
- This _was_ done a couple of decades ago, it was available on the downloadable version of google earth (when it existed). I remember playing around with it in 2012.by boshalfoshal
- Do people in the comments not realize this is a very old feature from desktop Google Earth that's just now being brought to the web version? I see so many joke comments or those simply out of the loop thinking this is something new, it's not.by satvikpendem
- Some people weren't born when it was released and now are 20 years old it was released in 2007
We old haha
by exadeci - Fun fact: you can also generate 3D buildings in Google Earth: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/earth/gener...
I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.
by ozaiworld - Google abandoned a product? That's strange.by mrhottakes