It is not possible to view location photos, find out the date the imagery was taken, import personal raster files, or calculate a route. The lack of a number of functions common in Google Earth is disappointing. However, what is goon for the interface is not as good for functionality. Its main principle is ‘nothing superfluous’. The functionality of ArcGIS Earth is similar to the software’s interface. This kind of minimalism is quite justified and is a big contrast to an overloaded Google Earth interface. The bottom part shows current hover coordinates (2D at the moment) and ‘camera altitude’. Top left corner contains a search form, globe orientation zoom buttons. These enable measurements and exporting imagery. Layer control buttons are grouped in the top left corner. And the interface menus do not in any way distract the attention from it. The globe itself in the main feature of ArcGIS Earth. ArcGIS Earth reminds of sci-fi movies, makes one want to open it on a huge high-def screen and operate it with confident hand movements (see figure 1). All this said, it was quite hard to withstand temptation of testing ArcGIS Earth beta available from October of this year.įirst word in my mind after launching ArcGIS Earth – “Cool!” Google Earth interface still reminds of the time when phones had buttons. However, when you think about it, ESRI is in fact the only company having enough possibilities to be a real competition for Google Earth. This piece of news was received rather skeptically. That is why when in summer 2015 ESRI announced the development of a virtual globe with an ‘original’ name ArcGIS Earth (at least it’s not ESRI Earth). But still if any GIS specialist is asked to list their favourite virtual globes, this list will be very short (and will probably contain one item).
In the following years GIS technologies have undergone drastic changes. This is not surprising as it was the release of Google Earth back in 2005 that initialized mass market oriented rapid geospatial technology development. When it comes to GIS technology most people think of Google Earth and Google Maps first.