I started off by being totally blown away by maps.google.com. I wanted to make a "satellite film" travelling over endless landsacpes, a flight for hours over different kind of landscapes, zooming out and diving back in stopping and observing and then flying off again.
Obviously this wasn't really possible, but I wanted at least have small snapshots of landscapes like big cities with skyscrapers and suburbs. So I found this terraserver from microsoft and noticed how easily it was possible to grab tiled images at different resolution levels. This is the curl one-liner I came up with:

curl "http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
tile.ashx?t=4&s=8&x=[7730-7830]&y=[756
23-75628]&z=11" -o "x=#1_y=#2.jpg"


So I let this script run over various locations of the US, just trying to have a reasonable big radius so hopefully I would capture some interesting structures. Was a beautiful feeling to just let it run off and download 1000 of pics from a satellite somewhere over LA.
After that I used processing to compose big tif files out of the single tiles. I ended up with 2-3gb tiff files, at one point reaching a pixel limit when trying to open them in Photoshop.
Eventually i managed to load them into 3d and make some flyovers.
Ideally they would be endless, or even in realtime, zooming in out flying along some shoreline take a turn left look at some almost isometric skyscrapers...

TT // 2006