Geomapping goes splat: The evolving future of Google Earth

Google Earth is going through an evolution.

Back in 2019, photographers Larry Strange and Joe Del Tufo traveled 1,200 miles to buy one of only two Seitz Roundshot VR Drive cameras in the United States at the time. 

The Swiss camera was the top of the line, creating high-quality photographic spheres, also known as panospheres. Strange and Del Tufo have used the Roundshot to photograph VR tours of landmarks such as the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, and to create 360-degree images for Google Earth.

Strange, who founded Unified Web Media (UWM), a visual technology company that, among other things, contracted with businesses to make Street View images, was one of only 200 Google Trusted Photographers worldwide invited to The Street View Conference in London that year.

A few months later, just before the COVID pandemic hit, he found himself working for Google and pivoted away from UWM. The position wasn’t part of maps, as it happened, but it helped him gain insight into the platform.

“I basically worked there for the course of the pandemic,” Strange told Technical.ly. “The nice thing about working for them is they’re very transparent internally, so I could just sidle up to the Maps team and talk to them about all my hard questions.”

In 2023, he left Google ready to return to geomapping — specifically what’s called geospatial or 3D mapping — and is now launching a new geospatial services venture called Modern Mapping. What he’d learned told him that, as amazing and valuable as the Roundshot is when it comes to capturing high-quality Google Earth images, the future of the platform is in a whole new dimension.

Geomapping in three dimensions

Strange hovers his laptop cursor over a satellite view of Atlantic City, zooming out gradually until blocks of yellow come into view. These areas, he says, are Google Earth’s future. (To see this yourself using Google Earth on desktop, click on “layers” on the bottom left of the screen and toggle on “3D coverage.”) When you zoom in on these urban areas, you’ll see the buildings come into focus, appearing almost like 3D models you might see in a train set, but much, much more detailed.

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“That’s a ‘splat’” Strange said, pointing to the digital 3D model. The splat file format is used to create 3D renderings that can be zoomed in on, rotated and explored.

A click just north of the resort town, outside of the yellow area showed streets and neighborhoods you can virtually jump into with Street View, but the aerial view is pixilated and lacks the immersive 3D effect. Like many areas of the globe, it hasn’t yet been upgraded.

The upgrade, he said, is created with a combination of Google’s own imaging and on-the-ground imaging made by creators like him. He pulls up some Street View imagery of the Atlantic City boardwalk he shot a few years ago using a 360-degree backpack camera. Those images combine with layers of images from above — satellite images, of course, but also drone and airplane images that happen over our heads without our even knowing. 

Remember the New Jersey mystery drones? Strange acknowledged that there’s a good chance that some of them were recording images to build Google Earth splats. 

“I call it the Street View in the sky,” Strange said. “They’re running planes with Street View cameras on a crop duster pattern.”

While the Roundshot still gets plenty of use by Del Tufo’s Moonloop Photography business, the evolution of Google Earth means Strange is back in the market for new, hard-to-find equipment like the LixelKity K1handheld scanner, more of a 3D modeling device than a traditional camera. It combines 360-degree photography with LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, which captures in 3D by measuring how long it takes for reflected light to return to the receiver.

“I would have had it by now if there weren’t China export problems,” Strange said. With tariffs complicating importing technology from Asia, he has once again narrowed it down to a single US supplier. “My capture will no longer be with the camera that mounts on the backpack with just GPS; I’ll have all the immersive dimensionality components I need to be able to grab a full 360.”

Other items in his splat collection arsenal include a high-end Nvidia graphics card, a camera drone and a 650W Workstation power supply unit that can handle the PostShot and Supersplat software.

That’s not to say that the Google Earth images created by the Roundshot are obsolete. “The imagery that comes out of products like the Roundshot, if you have the original source images, you can repurpose them into splats,” Strange said. “I think that’s really important for people to understand that you can get reusability if you shoot it right the first time. It’s always our premise for taking the highest resolution or future-proofing it.”

The reality is that places change in four or five years, and most urban areas will be re-shot using the newest equipment every few years anyway. But Photo Spheres, which the Roundshot excels at, continue to dot Google Earth, as new, animated Immersive Images show birds-eye views of well-known landmarks. Eventually, Strange says, any location will be able to have its own Immersive Image made for Earth, complete with links to things like visitor information and ticket sales.

Learning as they go

As geomapping technology evolves, creators like Strange rely on each other to learn about the newest tools and techniques — it’s so new that there are no classes out there teaching aspiring splatters how to splat. Instead, a community of geomappers, some with ties to Google, share their creations on social media.

“Everything I learned was between Discord and LinkedIn,” Strange said. “There’s a thriving community where every day it’s almost too much because everybody is working with this stuff in real time.”

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Geomapping influencers from across the globe explore 3D imaging, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And while the most immersive uses of Google Earth are experienced in VR, creators who look to the platform as part of their business models know that its applications go far beyond virtual travel and geomap gaming. It can bring people, not just to a street view of a location, but inside of it. Famously, you can tour The Louvre in Paris on Google Earth, but it can also be used for civil engineering and infrastructure planning, to create agriculture maps, for research and journalism. Strange takes Google Earth imagery and edits it with CapCut to zoom in on a location to create a visualization of a location that is far more detailed than a 2D map and add information as a voiceover and/or text.

Creators are pushing the multiple uses of its Earth platform — and they’re looking for ways to push the tech to the next level out of their own workspaces, wherever they are.

“I can build a rig to be able to do my own splat processing,” Strange said. “I think that’s where a lot of people are headed.”