Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Did Google Maps Switch to a Globe?”.
Thanks for watching tech, quickie click, the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon. So you won’t miss any future videos. So the answer to today’s question is actually pretty simple. Google is yet another greedy corporation trying to pull the wool over our eyes and hide the truth that the earth is actually a flat surface, surrounded on all sides by walls of ice. Oh gotcha, just kidding.
We aren’t flat earthers here at Tech wiki, but other than making Google Maps look a little cooler when you zoom all the way out. What exactly was the point of switching away from the flat map that we’re all familiar with from grade school? Well, as it turns out, making any kind of map look flat is a relatively in exact science. For example. Imagine if you painted the outside of a grapefruit to look like a globe, then you let the paint dry, peeled it and laid the peel flat to make a 2 dimensional map.
Well, you’d quickly realize that not only do the shapes of landforms and bodies of water get a little distorted when you flatten them, but you can forget about trying to make the map a perfectly neat. Rectangle, in fact, part of the reason that this map projection that you’ve, probably seen in old school world atlases look so funny is because it’s attempting to show shapes and sizes more accurately than would be possible if you were trying to stretch the map to fit it Inside a rectangular space – and this was especially noticeable on the projection used for a long time by Google called the Mercator. Even though this map projection actually goes back over 400 years, Google favored it for their Maps application over others, because it’s quite good at preserving angles, which is important, because so many people use Google Maps for navigation. In fact, the Mercator became popular long ago, precisely because it’s accurate angles help sailors, navigate the high seas with confidence, but Mercator also has a very obvious flaw.
You see the projection works by showing you what you’d get. If you have stuck the earth inside a cylinder that was just big enough to hold it kind of like putting a tennis ball in a can so the middle of the earth, the equator will touch the sides of the can, but areas closer to the North and South Poles have to be stretched out in order to touch the cylinder which you would then unroll to get a Mercator map in the world. This stretching means that the sizes of land masses are inaccurate, and this is especially true.
The further you get from the equator, for example, Greenland looks much bigger than Australia on a Mercator map, even though it’s actually the other way around in real life, which was mostly fine since odds are that you aren’t doing much. Traveling Antarctica or the very northern reaches of Canada, but Google made the change anyway, since, even though a globe is three dimensional, which means your computer’s graphics, processor has to do extra work in order to render it smoothly. On your monitor, the processing power available in the typical, desktop or laptop has come a long way since the service was first launched in 2005.
With that said, if you go to Google Maps right now, you may actually hear your laptop get a little louder as the fan speed increases, that’s your GPU firing up, or at least it should as long as you have hardware acceleration enabled in your browser. Interestingly, the answer to this question also probably addresses why this feature isn’t available on the maps app for smartphones just yet, it would really suck to see your phone battery drained just because you lost your fidget spinner and decided to keep flicking that virtual globe around to Satisfy your social media, addled attentions bad speaking of you know, making your whatever juggling multiple computers is difficult. You end up with various sets of mice and keyboards on your desk, which not only looks messy, but it can get super confusing, which one goes for which KVM switches can partially solved this problem. But we found that they aren’t very seamless and can be cumbersome. Well with synergy, you can move a single mouse and keyboard between your computers seamlessly to make them feel like just one system, you can check out the full details at the link below. So, thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos, don’t forget to subscribe for future fast as possible and leave a comment.
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