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Check Out the Latest Version of Google Earth

Announcement
April 16, 2008

Today we’re introducing a new version of the Google Earth desktop client. The new release, Google Earth version 4.3, greatly advances our vision of offering a realistic, 3D model of the world in Google Earth by giving users a higher quality, more immersive experience. Google Earth 4.3 also adds more realistic, real-world data so users have more ways to discover and explore all the interesting features the world has to offer.

Here are the highlights:

  • New navigation – We’ve created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.
  • More, faster 3D buildings – Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. We’ve significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.
  • Street View – The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.
  • Sunlight feature – This new addition is a playful way to control the sun’s location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth. While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.
  • Image acquisition date – One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.
  • New languages – Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Keep an eye on the Google LatLong (google-latlong.blogspot.com) blog for more details on Google Earth version 4.3 over the course of the week.

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