The default view is a ground-level wireframe with peak names, which is great but hardly new.  Peakfinder.org has been doing that for a while, and packages the functionality in a nice mobile app to boot.

Step 1 was to add aerial imagery to the view, which helps give a better sense of what you are (or will be) looking at:

You could do this in Google Earth by importing a KML file with all the local summits, but Earth’s ground-level view can be frustrating to work with.  And you can’t zoom in on distant summits, only move towards them.

I noticed that it was hard to drop the “eye” exactly where you want it, and sometimes the actual summit would obscure part of the view.  So I added an option to control the eye altitude.  And I kept making it taller and taller, eventually taking it up up and away into the stratosphere.  The rendering math I’m using assumes a small eye elevation relative to the radius of the earth, so this isn’t a perfect representation of what you’d actually see from that height, but I do think it provides some new and interesting terrain visualizations.  Click the linked captions for large, interactive versions:

It may be personal bias, but for some uses I prefer the zoom in from a fixed point approach used by CalTopo over the zoom by panning approach used in Google Earth.  The perspective feels more like the relief models found in NPS visitor centers, and makes it easier for me to wrap my brain around large-scale terrain features.