Zooming In On Baghdad

By Chris Taylor

You don't have to join the Air Force to fly over Iraq. As anybody who has watched CNN's Baghdad bomb-damage reports knows, it's now easy to pull up satellite images of a major military target and dive into a 3-D landscape rich in hills and valleys, all built from real-world data. Zoom in close enough, and you can see cars on the streets, the shadows of trees and the swimming pools of Saddam's palaces.

Want to try it at home? All you need is an up-to-date PC--the kind with a built-in 3-D graphics card--and a piece of software called Earthviewer from Keyhole Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. A trial version is available for download at Earthviewer.com the service costs $79 a year unless your PC's graphics card was made by Nvidia, an investor in Keyhole, in which case it's free. A broadband connection is highly recommended.

Apart from Iraq, Earthviewer can show Baghdad-level detail for most major U.S. and European cities. For now, the rest of the globe is a little more fuzzy. Still, it's pretty cool to fly from a street in San Diego to Basra in 10 seconds. Even the Air Force can't do that. --By Chris Taylor