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Terra Bella
- taylorwc 11y agoThis project is amazing. The site's scrolling should be memorialized in a museum of awful user experiences for posterity's sake.
- kanche 11y agoDoes anyone really like this kind of scrolljacking pages? Not responding properly on an MBP 2015. The project looks so interesting that I tortured myself by scrolling till the end. To me it feels similar to invasion of space.
- taylorwc 11y agoI couldn't agree more. I'm constantly surprised by the number of people that implement it.
- zzleeper 11y agoNot working on Win10 with latest Chrome either. Clicks ("Next Observation") take me down and then up where I was; then scrolling is jumpy and extremely annoying to read
- rhizome 11y agoDoesn't Google hire the best of the best?
- gkya 11y ago> Does anyone really like this kind of scrolljacking pages? Web devs. I guess it's like an accomplishment for them to create sth. like this (tho I didn't see it, just what I saw from the comments, if it's laggy on a recent macbook, I don't bother). In this context I think it is a bit like high-fructose corn syrup: The whole thing seems superfluous, what would I be able to do if I could watch a volcano eruption? Throw water from a plane? Tweet #stoplavaviolence? What benefit would I, or any construction companies would have from watching that particular gold mine? If I have a business there, I'd probably know what's going on, and I'd try to make acquaintances to get information directly, instead of trying to get it out of some pixels. If a video from high up was needed for an humanitarian situation, a helicopter can go up and take the video. All this stupidity should be marketed, and the website is the confectioner's sugar for the crap called Terra Bella. Terra bella, coeptum superfluus.
- S4M 11y agoYep, it's a very ambitious project, but the scrolling is utterly broken for me (firefox 43.0 on Debian), and seeing from other comments, I'm not the only one. Wonder how someone can possibly ship a website where the scrolling is so broken.
- subie 11y agoLooks wonderful in chrome.
- egeozcan 11y agoChrome 48, Windows 10. I actually opened the task manager to see if some bg process was torturing the CPU after trying to scroll.
- degenerate 11y agoLooks wonderful, perhaps, but plays wonderful it does not. There must have been 12 history items added to my back button before I was able to "scroll" down even a fraction of the page...
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoIf you saw the launch of YouTube Gaming as well, or how the old version of Google+ ran on not-Chrome, you'd have long reached the conclusion that nobody at Google tests on non-Google web browsers. My understanding is they like using 'web technologies' that they invented that either aren't implemented or well-supported in any browser but their own.
- RGamma 11y agoIt gets worse if you browse the web with zoom. At 125% zoom scrolling gets stuck on the third stage for me and imagery is consistently cut off. If you then use the scroll bar all bets are off, and the site very slowly stutters from one random place to the next (not to mention, that there's zero thought put into a graceful fallback when JS is disabled, although with e.g. lynx you at least get to see the site's text instead of just the loading icon).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rbinv 11y agoUnbearable scrolling behavior in Chrome on a late 2013 MBP.
- evmar 11y agoI (and likely many others on this site) am tired of people complaining about weird-scrolling sites, but this one is exceptional: I can't get it to actually display the content! At some point scrolling gets somehow stuck and I can't scroll down anymore.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> At some point scrolling gets somehow stuck and I can't scroll down anymore. You just have to scroll harder. Seriously. Every time it got stuck for me I just tried scrolling faster and after a few swipes it would move on.
- iSnow 11y agoWorks for me with Firefox 46 and no ad-blocker/script-blocker except uBlock. However, navigating the page is confusing as hell, I stumbled through it by using the little arrows on my scrollbar. Everything else would catapult me to seemingly random positions on the page. Seems to me they hijacked scrolling to make "one line down" "one section down". Not going to lie, after fighting with the scrolling, I closed the page and came here to look for an explanation what this is all about - not going to click any links there.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoMy fan is going crazy, and I'm having trouble even tabbing to another app on a mid-2014 MBP.
- bpicolo 11y agoDitto, that page used insane amounts of CPU or something
- johansch 11y agoIt runs really nicely on my 4.4 GHz i4790k windows pc. Get a better computer? ;)
- manaskarekar 11y agoThis post makes me wonder about space pollution/saturation. Are there any resources that talk about what is a safe number of satellites for different altitudes and the effects of space pollution? I have heard of the Kessler Syndrome, any suggestions that discuss this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- gravypod 11y agoAs long as the satellites are under a certain mass, they will eventually get too close to Earth and burn up once they are pulled into reentry.
- mino 11y agoThat doesn't really depend on mass, but on drag and altitude. See for example Figure 10 of: http://www.agi.com/downloads/resources/white-papers/20110808_SmallSat_CubeSat_Orbit_Lifetime_10.pdf http://www.agi.com/downloads/resources/white-papers/20110808...
- gravypod 11y agoYea, that makes much more sense. I've always wanted to get a group of people together at my college and build a CubeSat but when you say "I want to build a satellite" people think you are crazy. We have the labs, the supplies, and the ability to expense anything we want but no one thinks it is possible.
- Cshelton 11y agoJust do it. You'd be surprised at what money and support may come your way ;) It's very much possible.
- knappe 11y agoI can't encourage this enough. It was one of the most rewarding things I did in college. We launched a cubesat and used it to capture images of the curvature of the Earth and measure the Earth's magnetic field. The work to build the cubesat was tough, but extremely rewarding. Edit: Check out http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/spacegrant/home/Space_Grant_Consortium_Websites.html http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/spac... and see if you can find a local Space Grant program. They'd more than likely be able to either get you the resources or point you in the right direction to get going. We launched ours via a ballon which had the cubesats attached to it. We needed a micro-controller (even easier to find now) a camera and our sensors. All very obtainable. I think the most expensive thing was the magnetometers which ran $80 a pop.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- trequartista 11y agoVery ambitious. Will be interesting to see how it pans out. Interestingly, Google acquired Terra Bella in 2014. Even though the domain says google.com, is this an Alphabet subsidiary or part of Google itself?
- eunoia 11y agoI'm also curious about this. Isn't this exactly the kind of project Alphabet was created to wrap? i.e. something not related to Google's core business but still under the corporate umbrella?
- tzakrajs 11y agoTerra Bella is under Geo, which is where Maps resides. Seems like a pretty good fit to me, given that satellite imagery is presented in Maps. Why do you think Terra Bella should be in Alphabet?
- eunoia 10y agoThat makes perfect sense actually. I was erroneously thinking of Terra Bella as a standalone project instead of as an extension to one of Google's core products.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoMy guess is it would be, but hasn't been formally spun out yet?
- tzakrajs 11y agoSkybox rebranded to Terra Bella on Mar 8th 2016. They were acquired and placed in the Geo organization (Maps) so they aren't just floating about as a one-off: http://spacenews.com/googles-skybox-imaging-has-new-name-business-model/ http://spacenews.com/googles-skybox-imaging-has-new-name-bus...
- nostrademons 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- frisco 11y agoHold on hold on. This is a big swarm of satellites and (I assume) a forthcoming API and the comments are "the scrolling sucks"? They could have used tables and comic sans for all I care. This is awesome. Though Planet Labs will always be my first affection in this space. Talk about a hard and interesting problem. This data takes you to so many different places.
- zzleeper 11y agoI still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?
- frisco 11y agoWhether it's a consumer sale (sign up via web and get an API key) I do not know, but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. In terms of what you can use it for, I know people have built applications on top of Planet Labs to run queries from counting the number of cars in Walmart parking lots every day for hedge funds to tracking deforestation.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. So they make money by potential customers guessing at what they can provide them and reaching out to them? Seems like a terrible way to do business. Unless I missed it (which would be easy; damn is it hard to get to the content on that site) I see no information about anything other than what they do internally. Which is cool but that's about where it ends.
- dhimes 11y agoThis is afaict a pr buzz piece. They apparently are hiring.
- 21 11y ago
- acomjean 11y agoInteresting. If you like satellite images and some interesting analysis, I suggest checking out Nasa's earth observatory. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/ http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/
- mcculley 11y agoInteresting. I'm assuming there will be areas that we are prohibited from imaging. Will these be limited to areas defined by the US Government or every government that Google works with?
- Bedon292 11y agoThey likely can take images of everywhere in the world. They will very likely be limited as to who they can sell certain areas to, at various resolutions. The US government restricts sale of imagery under 31cm resolution currently, but previously it was 50cm. Neither of those restrictions would apply to these satellites which are 90cm resolution, but similar things will probably apply elsewhere. I believe Israel is one of those places with a coarser limit in place.
- jayhuang 11y agoHaving worked in this area, I can say you are on the right track. Not only the US, there are many countries/powers that will get very upset if certain people see certain areas. As for who gets to see what, there are extremely stringent rules set by many of these governments; even within government organizations themselves, there is huge variation in access constraints.
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoThis seems strange to me, considering there is high resolution "birds eye"(taken from a plane) imagery of a variety of sensitive US installations available on Bing, not to mention what's on Google Maps/Earth. There are other sources as well.
- adrianlmm 11y agoWhat am I supposed to see? http://imgur.com/RXMn72r http://imgur.com/RXMn72r
- pboutros 11y agoYou're supposed to see a redirect to chrome.google.com :)
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoInteresting, it worked okay on Edge for me. Though the initial splash thing was a bit slow/chunky.
- aznpwnzor 11y agoanybody have luck with the "join us" link? Doesn't show up on google's job search
- dbcurtis 11y agoIs there a readable version of the web site that doesn't have obnoxious scrolling? Someone needs to tell their designers about the Principle of Least Surprise. I'll look at this after they fix this so it doesn't give me a headache.
- choward 11y agoThis fad has got to stop.
- Gigablah 11y agoYes, "View Source".
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoThe worst part was trying to Back. Just scrolling actually adds a bunch of URLs to your back queue, so when you want to back out of the URL, you end up hitting back like ten times. :/ I suppose New Tab would be my best friend here so I can just X it, but weird abuse of basic browser functionality should be shamed.
- vram22 11y ago>The worst part was trying to Back. Just scrolling actually adds a bunch of URLs to your back queue How does that happen?
- everfree 11y agoOne way is by using JS to change the address bar location using window.location or history.pushState(), instead of using history.relpaceState() which doesn't create an extra history entry each time.
- JBReefer 11y agoI would vote for a president that ran a campaign _only_ based on quirky punishments for those who use history.pushState() They should have to open a door repeatedly, only to have someone push them back when they try to walk through for a few weeks, for example!
- swampthinker 11y agoIt's actually impossible to use this page on mobile. Scrolling is just locked.
- CaptSpify 11y agoAll I got was a blue webpage. No loading icons or anything
- MagicWishMonkey 11y agoIt doesn't work on my macbook pro, either (running chrome). It's so broken it's kind of amusing.
- svs 11y agoWhich one do you prefer? Alan Parson's sombre take (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNiie_zmSr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNiie_zmSr8) or Judas Priest's angry laser-tinged screed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B_pZC8aWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B_pZC8aWU) as the soundtrack to our state of total surveillance?
- Jordrok 11y agoHoly crap, that took forever to load...
- trymas 11y agoReadable version: [view-source:https://terrabella.google.com/?s=about-us&c=about-history https://terrabella.google.com/?s=about-us&c=about-history] (paste whole text in between brackets, seems like HN does not support markdown links) Great content, though original presentation is unusable. My whole computer started to lag, not only the web browser (chrome). Probably Google's web developers use very powerful workstations..
- vram22 11y ago>Great content, though original presentation is unusable. My whole computer started to lag, not only the web browser (chrome). Probably Google's web developers use very powerful workstations.. Yes, this is one thing I've noticed; I think your guess is right. It is a peeve of mine about some Google products. Some of their other products seem to have the same or similar issues - and not just performance; truncated or somewhat unusable UI is another area, due to monitor size, for one. When Wave first came out, I tried, it was so slow as to be unusable. You'd think that they would test their products on lower-specced hardware, knowing that not everyone has the same h/w as them.
- grandalf 11y agoWow I expect a big acquisition of planet labs soon.
- hackuser 11y agoWhile it will have some great uses, it also brings more surveillance and predictive analytics (if that's the term) to the world, and chillingly they don't address the social issues at all. Will Google use this, or allow others to use this, to surveil me from space? How about protesters at this summer's U.S. political conventions? Will they allow me to use this to watch Google's headquarters? It also concentrates more power in the hands of a few. If the predictive tech works well, how can ordinary people who don't have access to that information compete? As investors in the stock market? Their small business in the marketplace? As a grassroots competitor in a political campaign?
- samstave 11y agoIMO, there is nothing greater good vs mass surveillance that will come of this. This is an NSA wet dream privatized and privately funded by Google. Sounds great but we all know what's going to happen with this data.
- mmanfrin 11y agoSuch technology is already being used in this way, and has been compared chillingly to tracking 'precrime'; there is a terrifying Radiolab episode on it: http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/
- dcposch 11y agoThats about Gorgon Stare and similar plane / blimp / drone based survillance. Satellites orbit at an altitude several 100 times higher and are much less invasive. There are a lot of cool applications, like cartography, monitoring farmland, monitoring the icecaps, etc. I care deeply about civil liberties, but I think this is not the droid we're looking for.
- btian 11y agoI'd like Google to track down highway patrol cops and integrate it with Waze / Maps.
- bobwaycott 11y agoFrontend devs, please for the love of whatever you deem holy, stop fucking up the browser back button and scrolling.
- anotherhacker 11y agoCan someone either summarize what this is, or point to a another reference? My questions: How does it make my life better. What can I do with this service, that I couldn't do before. As others mentioned, the website is difficult to understand (for me at least)
- anotherhacker 11y agoOk I found this, but it's just as nebulas. "As proud as we are to have played a leading role in developing satellite technologies, we have realized that our vision extends far beyond boxes in the sky. As Google revolutionized search for the online world, we have set our eyes on pioneering the search for patterns of change in the physical world. In order to focus firmly on the future, we’re pursuing that vision under a new name – Terra Bella."
- kilovoltaire 11y agoThanks for the quote. And just fyi it's "nebulous" :)
- bitfury 11y agoanyone know the breed of that dog on the "Meet our team" section ?
- dbmnt 11y agoIt looks most similar to a Siberian Husky to me, although the face is different. Possibly a mixed breed from the husky, or just a unique looking husky.
- phantom_oracle 11y agoThis is something equivalent to what geo-mapping companies have been doing around large industrial areas using low-flying aeroplanes taking high-res photography for analysis. It's basically "adding satellite" to geo-mapping technology to "address real-time demand and analysis". It's all good if they keep this shit near the mining/farming/ports, etc. However, this being Google (Big Brother), you can expect that they'd try using this for "traffic analysis" (cause Waze is not enough) and then slowly encroach into your neighbourhood, so that when they finally launch their blimps, you can look at the sky and you will see the ads that your browser blocked. Granted though, if Google isn't/wasn't going to do this, somebody else probably will (or already is).
- finishingmove 11y agoTwo takeaways: 1. Big brother is watching (and photographing -- yikes) everything. 2. The website is horribly slow on a 4 year old laptop.
- lukas099 11y agoIt's interesting that it's a "Google company" and not "Alphabet".
- thrownaway2424 11y agoWhy is that interesting? Geospatial data is one of Google's largest lines of business. It was Google's third major effort after search and email. They've been in the business for over a decade.
- systemz 11y agoSite is too buggy to even read this short text and Google give guidelines to webmasters how to make their sites...
- hasbosun 11y agoI can't see it :(
- hasbosun 11y agoI can't see it :|
- rmm 11y agoAs an aside, I have worked at Oyu Tolgoi and been there several times. It is one impressive gold mine. IIRC the power station for the mine site is almost 30% of the entire countries existing prodution capacity. Awesome.
- revelation 11y agoI don't get it, what's new? There are a number of companies doing satellite imagery, you can usually find them by reading the name on the bottom right of your Google Maps view. And yes, these companies also track mining fields and what not, they just don't pretend it's some charity thing.
- sixothree 11y agoObviously something is different about this and they feel the need for preemptive branding.
- Animats 11y agoThis is Skybox Imaging.[1] Google bought them in 2014. When, after the long loading delay, a globe appeared, I thought I'd be able to manipulate and view the globe. No such luck; it's just a static-appearing site. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZgQZG4WEyoN2 https://goo.gl/maps/ZgQZG4WEyoN2
- 13of40 11y agoIt consistently crashes Chrome on my iPad.
- shawn-butler 11y agoCan't even bother to read this. Is it just a rebranded site for Skybox post-Google? I can honestly say Skybox had an extremely usable site previously. This is downright horrible.
- n3storm 11y agoNo "meta" "description" nor "keywords" on <head> (Sorry, I dream on a future where keywords are relevant). Tens of <script> at bottom. I bet all of you are crashing because of the webgl stuff.
- sidcool 11y agoThe top three comments complaining about site's usability. The fourth top level comment actually wonders about space pollution. Lets get our shit together, HN. Let's comment anything, but upvote things about Terra Bella and it's potential applications, because there's no website that would please everybody.
- DavideNL 11y agoThe page doesn't even load for me... (latest Chromium browser on OS X)