The effect of Google Earth on ArcGlobe

One of the most disappointing aspects of ArcGlobe (aside from performance) is the default view.

ArcGlobe

This was probably fine back in the late 90’s when GIS professionals just didn’t know any better, but now with Google Earth becoming the standard of digital globes, implementing ArcGlobe becomes difficult given that you don’t get much good data out of the box (we expect all this satellite imagery as free don’t you know). A client of ours asked how they could get ArcGlobe to look and work like Google Earth, specifically the 3D airspace we created for them. Since the airspace was a 3D shapefile, it didn’t take more than a second to load it in to ArcGlobe for them to see. The response was less than enthusiastic given what they were expecting. Google Earth by default has all the imagery they want…

Google Earth

Of course I was able to quickly export the shapefile to Google Earth using Arc2Earth, but we were running it on the clients personal laptop because they can’t run Google Earth at their place of work. I fired up ArcGIS Explorer to show him what was coming on line from ESRI, but he then asked if that data will be available in ArcGlobe. I didn’t think that was the plan, but wouldn’t ArcGlobe be so more useful if it had access to the same datasets as ArcGIS Explorer below?

ArcGIS Explorer 9.2 Build 306

updated grammer