Do you love looking out the window every time you travel by plane? Do you have Google Earth downloaded to your computer or mobile phone and from time to time you decide to ‘go down’ to some place on Planet Earth? Do you envy birds for their perspective?
Now you can not only feel like a pilot or astronaut on an occasional basis, but you have the opportunity to do it permanently. Google has announced that it has published a thousand wallpapers from its Google Earth tool with impressive satellite images from around the world.
“Ten years ago I was flying over San Francisco when a strange but kaleidoscopic sight materialized outside my plane window. When I got home I opened Google Earth to investigate. The aerial wonder along the southern end of the bay turned out to be the salt ponds, ”says Gopal Sah, Google Earth Product Manager, in a post. “As an amateur photographer I instinctively took a screenshot of the now well-defined landscape on my computer. And with a simple act, Earth View was born ”, he explains.
Earth View would be a compilation of thousands of the most impressive landscapes of our planet seen from space . To date, these images have been shared as wallpapers for Android, Chromecast or Google Home devices, but now they are all in one place and can be downloaded by anyone who wants to.
Search by color or by landscape
Earth View has been up and running for a while now, but this is its biggest update to date. Over a thousand new images of Earth have been added, some in 4K. In total, the collection would already have more than 2,500 landscapes that are silenced by their beauty.
To materialize the project, the Mountain View company has counted on the collaboration of the German company Ubilabs . The two have been collaborating in recent years to explore millions of square meters of satellite imagery while managing how to configure the camera to shoot the best possible shot. To prepare each final image they would have optimized the color profile for that particular landscape and exported the final image in ultra high resolution, reveals Sah.
How would you like to find your new wallpaper? The tool allows you to filter by location or by color , depending on your preferences. You can try your luck to see if satellite images of your city, autonomous community or region are available from the selection. A color map has also been added so that you can find shots that have your favorite tone with just one click.
“As a species, we have only had access to views from space for the last 50 years. However, something encoded in us a long time ago seems to wake up when we see the world on this unprecedented scale ”, underlines the product manager of Google Earth. “Earth View has the power to elevate our minds from our small screens to outer space: the landscapes that materialize when you open a new tab or unlock your phone mark your day with a global mirror,” he says.
