Introduction to Google Earth Studio

Under normal circumstances, test driving a new app to hit the web scene is something that’s a thoroughly procedural affair.

It goes a little something like this:

• Get started with the basics.
• Get stuck, read the documentation.
• Documentation isn’t great, Google the issue.
• Go back to app, create something, share thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I love trying out new stuff and sharing it with my fellow developers. But Google Earth Studio was a cut above the rest from the time I hit the landing page.

So what the heck is Google Earth Studio? Simply stated, it’s a web-based animation tool for Google Earth and 3D imagery. You know those cutaways of high-tech cities you see in video games and sci-fi movies? Those could have been developed using Google Earth Studio. And that’s just two of thousands of use cases for this tool.

Here’s how it works:

It’s just like a non-linear video editor like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, only it’s an entirely browser-based experience. Starting projects, saving projects, even rendering projects are done in Chrome (Google Earth Studio only supports Chrome right now, due to the software used to power the 3D rendering engine).

Once you start a project, you’re given a view of Google Earth where you can either explore or type in the location you want to start animating. For example, in the screenshot below, I typed in Minneapolis because I knew it would be ripe with 3D buildings and other imagery.

Now, I can either tilt the camera and zoom in using my camera controls (shown on the left side of the editor in the above photo), or use my trackpad to tweak as necessary to find some imagery with good textures. Here is a closer look at the same city.

Note how the Camera Position and Camera Rotation controls have updated (in real time) when I adjusted the image using my trackpad along with my Mac keyboard’s `alt` and `control` keys to control tilt and pan: