Have you heard about Google’s 20 percent time? Google encourages their employees to spend 20% of their work time working on their own projects. Usually, it results in some cool extension to an existing service, such as Google Reader, but it can also turn out to be a very important product, such as Gmail. The latest 20 percent project, however, is quite different from anything we’ve seen so far. Oddly dubbed the Liquid Galaxy, it’s a chamber in which the viewer is surrounded by LCDs which are displaying synchronized imagery from Google’s Street View or Google Earth. Creator of the project and software engineer at Google, Jason Holt, calls the end result “stunning”. From his blog post: “…all of a sudden, flying around in Google Earth really felt like flying, and exploring the ocean trenches was like piloting a submarine. When you splashed through the sea surface you cringed slightly, expecting to get wet. You could even command your own lander down to the Moon or Mars.” While we don’t... - stephen