You might not associate Google Earth with creativity and story-telling, given its many practical uses, which include environmental mapping and investigations into humanitarian crises. Perhaps the most personal use for Google Earth that comes to mind is looking up your own house on the street view for entertainment (everyone has definitely done this).
Even so, this event encouraged users to explore the creative possibilities that Google Earth provides. Long gone is the sole referencing of 2D square maps of the world that show inaccurate representations of country and continent sizes (looking at you Africa!). With the more than a billion stitched images that comprise Google Earth, users can jump in and out of countries and cross continents at the click of a mouse. This technology literally opens up our world to vast narrative potential.
We were shown the Voyager tool, which is ‘a showcase of interactive guided tours, quizzes, and layers that aim to help educate everyone about the world, locations near and far’ that you can access on the sidebar when you open Google Earth. With this and the creation tools, users can produce their own immersive projects or presentations that tell stories through global locations. You can annotate, place images or videos, and draw lines to map out certain areas. Once you have compiled your chosen locations, Google Earth will jump between them, creating a story for your viewers.
Through this, Google Earth is transformed into a fun and educational site that could be used to tell ancestral stories or raise awareness of specific places or journeys. Particularly in a pandemic, it can also sate our appetites for travel, and Voyager is certainly an underrated feature of a site that is so familiar.
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