3D trees in Google Earth

Google Earth is about to get something of a makeover thanks to more than 80 million 3D trees populating the product.

"Trees are part of the world we live in and if you fly over San Francisco with the trees turned on versus turned off it presents a different sense of what the city looks like," said Google Earth's vice president of product, the aptly-named Mr Birch.
He added that planting more than 80 million trees presented some technical challenges: working out where to put them; ensuring they were of the right type for the area and making them distinct enough to determine one species from another.
To start, six major cities have been populated with more than 60 different species: Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo are now home to models of dozens of species from the Japanese Maple and the East African Cordia to the cacao tree and the flowering dogwood.

Google Earth also gets a bit political as Mr Birch explained that they have started to model forest lands and areas of the world under threat such as the Amazon and Kenya and some of the work being done to restore the environment there.
The search giant worked with groups like the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and Conabio in Mexico.
"We want to tell a broader story of the trees and deforestation and climate change to draw attention to the things happening to our planet," he said.
"This brings home just how special trees are and how they need to be protected," added Raleigh Seamster from Google Earth's outreach team.
"Modelling these areas of deforestation will draw more attention to what is going on there."
Street View also gets woven more tightly into the offer. Yes, that same product that has been slightly tarnished of late with issues of collecting snippets of data it shouldn't have as the cars drove by people's homes to snap photos of neighbourhoods.
"Our goal is to really create this mirror world where people can travel to distant lands and learn about the planet and different areas. One of the problems is that the experience doesn't connect you all the way to the ground," said Mr Birch.
"It does a great job flying over mountains and cityscapes and your old childhood neighbourhood. But we all live on the ground and walk about the street and that is how we experience the Earth and this tighter integration with Street View gives us a great opportunity to complete the connection between the street level and this flying around."
The final change is an effort to make it easier to find out what historical images are available for a given area.

The upgrade was included in the previous release; this version invites users to fly to an area where historical imagery is available and see the date of the oldest images on a status bar at the bottom of the screen from London during the Blitz to Port-au-Prince in Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010.