Looks like the east coast of Vancouver Island got a huge resolution increase in Google Earth. Previously, a large proportion of this area was low-resolution satellite imagery. Now much of the island appears in what looks like half-metre (18 inch) resolution. The copyright on this data reads IMTCAN, which I assume is Integrated Mapping Technologies. In general, this is a great upgrade and these photos really show off some of the recently improved terrain.
I feel sorry for the folks in Port Alberni though… Not only did they miss out on the new imagery for most of the city, but they also have a huge imagery glitch in the middle of their community:
There are a couple other places where the imagery was not very well edge-matched (some white triangles in the middle of the Strait of Georgia) and there are some really odd colours in the water, but I think that most people will be happy to trade consistancy for clarity.
-J
1Darrell on Apr 16, 2008 at 2:22 am:
The increase in resolution looks great. Was it the change to IMTCAN data just recently that pushed the Metro Vancouver imagery back to images over 3 years old? We just had an update that brought us up to current data, images which were perhaps 6 months old - I think less than a month ago - and yesterday I looked and we are now back at images from over 5 years ago. Buildings that were taken down and now replaced are back again. There was a data set in between that was perhaps 3 years old or a bit older which was slightly lower res than the 5-year-old data. But having the current stuff and then losing it is like being a kid who has their christmas toys taken away on December 26th.
I am a member of the Port Moody Heritage Society and on the Port Moody Heritage Commission and so being able to see current information actually is useful to me, though doing this as a volunteer on my own time and money I have no budget. It is useful to be able to locate the heritage homes and sites in the city and make sense of where the new rapid transit planned routes will go to see how they impact things. That plus get a sense of new civic planning.
But darned but the imagery around Nanaimo is incredible! I also love exploring and hope to do some on the Island in near future, at least vicariously.
http://gnomestead.com/
http://portmoodystationmuseum.blogspot.com/
2Jason Birch on Apr 16, 2008 at 6:31 pm:
I haven’t been paying enough attention to know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I certainly sympathize
I _think_ a similar thing happenned in New Orleans, where higher resolution older images pushed out lower resolution newer images, and this caused a huge uproar.
The images around Nanaimo are only as good as they are because we were able to build support at the City to provide them to Google. Perhaps given enough public pressure, other municipalities would do the same.
One thing that we ran into back in 2005 was that our initial contract did not allow us to do this, so when we re-flew in 2006 we made sure that we retained the rights to provide the imagery to external agencies for the public good.