I'll be interested to see whether they support this for practical use, whether they provide programmability as much as the original, and how well they get it to work under WASM.
The original Google Earth Plugin worked well on even Core Duo laptops with very modest GPUs. I used it to do a technical Web front-end project that pushed the limits of the Plugin. At the time, there was no other viable way to do what was needed (with the requirement that it run in particular Web browsers, as part of a larger Web system).
In my project, I did have to do a cute little multi-step camera movement at the start of an interactive animation, to keep the Plugin from culling one of the objects I'd added to the scene. I still wonder how many people using that thought the camera movement was just zooming around for gee-whiz effect, or for spatial context, rather out of necessity that the core functionality work at all.
The original Google Earth Plugin worked well on even Core Duo laptops with very modest GPUs. I used it to do a technical Web front-end project that pushed the limits of the Plugin. At the time, there was no other viable way to do what was needed (with the requirement that it run in particular Web browsers, as part of a larger Web system).
In my project, I did have to do a cute little multi-step camera movement at the start of an interactive animation, to keep the Plugin from culling one of the objects I'd added to the scene. I still wonder how many people using that thought the camera movement was just zooming around for gee-whiz effect, or for spatial context, rather out of necessity that the core functionality work at all.