3pointD.com

3pointD has been missing London lately. So it was with no small amount of joy that we discovered that London is one of the cities featured in the especially cool Goggles: The Google Maps Flight Sim, created by London-based Flash developer Mark Caswell-Daniels (and linked in Glitchy links the other day). Goggles lets you fly a cute little cartoon plane around a Flash-based world built from Google Maps data. It looks better than the screen grab above, which is a bit juddery because it’s grabbing as the picture’s moving, but above all it’s a fun way to tour a bunch of the world’s great cities (and two more far-flung locations as well). You can speed up and slow down, bank, climb and dive (with a cute little explosion when you crash) and even fire little bubble shots from your forward-mounted bubble-gun. A massively multiplayer version of this would be outstanding. But read on for some slightly deeper thoughts on mapping technologies.

For those who are landmark-impaired and trying to find their way around Goggles: in London you start toward the east end of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, in Paris you start just southeast of the Eiffel Tower, and in New York you start on the Great Lawn in the middle of Central Park. There are a bunch of other cities as well. To tell you the truth, I only figured out the London start point with aid of an A-to-Z, though I know the city fairly well. Which raises an interesting point: the A-to-Z has for years (decades?) been the paper-based Google Maps of London. Available in many different sizes and bindings, it’s an invaluable resource for tourists, residents and cabbies-in-training doing The Knowledge. Will handheld computing devices capable of accessing Google Maps (or Goggles) on the fly one day put the A-to-Z out of print?

It will probably happen eventually, but not too soon. For one thing, there are already mobile versions of the A-to-Z available for download or purchase on CD-ROM, which work with S60, S80 and Symbian UIQ mobiles, and the Pocket PC, Palm and Windows Smartphone OSes. There’s even a GPS upgrade available, apparently. For another, it seems it will be some time before Google Maps gets as detailed as the A-to-Z always has been. Here’s a comparison of the area around Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which is pictured above:

Google Maps — larger version on Flickr

Scanned from the A-to-Z — larger version on Flickr

You can see how much more detail the A-to-Z provides. I imagine Google Maps will eventually get there, but it hasn’t yet. This doesn’t bother me much, as I’m a great fan of paper-based technologies, but it does point up some of the obstacles that digital mapping and world-mirroring have yet to overcome.