While watching Fox’s new comedy Unhitched I noticed a zoom from space, this looked awfully familiar, to me it looks like WorldWind, here are some screenshots (images removed as host server no longer active).
WorldWind screenshot
Except for some post processing it looks pretty close, the final zoom does look higher resolution, but to me that looks like an overlay, and in the credits it does say satellite imagery by NASA, I checked Yahoo/VE/Gmaps and none have the same high res image, so it is probably custom imagery.
Finally, just to show off, I made my own version of the zoom, with some post processing I’m sure my version would beat theirs, and I’m sure we could have come to some arrangement (I have my eye on a nice 8800GTS).
Edit – For anyone interested the unhitched apartment is located at 42.353271,-71.074365, off Commonwealth Ave in Boston, a high reslution version of my zoom can be found here (Xvid codec required).
Bull, you actually watched that show? It’ was funny early, then it died on me.
Bull likes pain and suffering I think… them brits are a crazy lot ;)
Yeah I know, but I was bored, it wasn’t as bad as some new shows though and once I saw the first zoom I had to keep watching for “research purposes” ;)
I’d recommend a 8800GT. Still the sweet spot for Nvidia cards at the moment (until the 9 series GT comes out). Or even the 9600 as a cheap but quite good alternative.