Big News: New Imagery July | New GE 4.3 Beta Available | Tour de France 2008

July 23, 2008

Links: Walking, Havana, Eclipse, Oil, Follow the Boat

• Walking Directions in Google Earth - Google has announced you can get walking directions in Google Maps. This new capability is in beta since they don't have thorough enough maps on pedestrian paths and walkways to give the most optimum routes. They encourage you to use common sense especially when going to unfamiliar places. But, the routes might help you calculate distances, or get an idea of routes in unfamiliar places. You could also drag the routes to adjust them to go by a park or a particular site. You can also view walking routes in Google Earth. Assuming you may choose multiple destinations, I recommend using a tool from Nearby. First, set up your walking directions in Google Maps. Then select the "Link to this page" and copy the "Past link in E-mail". Then visit Nearby's Multi-destination routing in KML tool, and paste the link. Click the "Get it now" button and you will get a link to "Download Google Earth KML File".

• Havana Panoramas - 360 Cities has released a hundred high resolution geo-tagged panoramas for Havana, Cuba. You can view Havana at their web site, or you can view all their panoramas in GE - including Havana - using the PhotoOverlay tool. I recommend turning on the Geographic Web layer while sightseeing so you can compare ground photos of these sites to the panoramas from 360Cities.

• Eclipse - Michael Kosowsky, of HeyWhatsThat wrote to let me know he has created visualizations for the upcoming total solar eclipse on August 1st. The path of totality crosses in Asia and the arctic regions (see the earlier post on the path visible in Google Earth). Michael uses his excellent planisphere application to generate a KML which lets you use the time slider to watch the total eclipse as viewed from Siberia. If you live in that part of the world, you can check to see how your view will look using the same animation by generating your own planisphere (enter your location, then choose the "Animation of the August solar eclipse" option and hit Submit. OgleEarth posts the full details we got from Michael.

• Oil - Another oil consumption visualization from 'giasen' at the GEC. This one shows oil consumption per state in the US where the height is the number of barrels of oil consumed per square mile (100 meters for each barrel).

• Follow the Boat - EarthNC is showing off some their excellent navigation and mapping tools for boaters by following one of their customers as they deliver a boat from Chicago to Florida via the Mississippi river. The customer is Captain Bill Foster, and he is using a 3G phone to upload position and web cam photos as he goes along. EarthNC is showing a map along with nautical chart information, live position, and web cam photos in a slick KML for Google Earth . Being able to watch a multi-day trip live in Google Earth is pretty cool. Captain Bill will probably stop for the night in places along the way, and he won't always have good cell phone reception. By the way, yesterday he went through downtown Chicago. Here is a screenshot of the Chicago passage from within Google Earth.

Posted by FrankTaylor at 07:54 AM | Comments (0)

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July 22, 2008

600 Starbucks Closures in Google Earth

On July 1st, Starbucks announced they will close about 600 stores around the US. Since that time, many caffeine lovers in those areas have started petitions to keep their favorite location from losing its juice. And, the markets have had their reaction that this is yet another sign of a collapsing economy. But, even more interesting is that Starbucks released a list of all the locations in a PDF file. Last week, Keir Clarke at GoogleMapsMania took the PDF and scraped the locations into a spreadsheet. Then he used batch geocode and the Google spreadsheet mapper tool to quickly (30 minutes to do the whole ) create a Google Maps map of the closures. I was kind of disappointed Keir didn't take the step to add a line of code to make his map available in the Earth API as well.

Fortunately, someone else scraped the same PDF and put the Starbucks closures into Finder!. Finder! is an excellent free browser-based service which lets you find, organize and share geospatial data in common formats. Including Google Earth's KML format. So, here's the Google Earth view of the Starbucks closures.

If you zoom into the placemarks, you'll find it's not always easy to find the particular store based on its address. Geocoding from addresses is usually not accurate - and sometimes places you a block away (or even more).

Just for fun, you can get a quick look at the same KML file in the Google Earth API plugin. Read below the fold to see it.

Continue reading "600 Starbucks Closures in Google Earth"

Posted by FrankTaylor at 07:40 AM | Comments (1)

July 21, 2008

Live Hurricane Hunter Missions in Google Earth

Hurricane reconnaissance is the most accurate way to get a read on the condition of a tropical storm or hurricane. Special aircraft, known as Hurricane Hunters, are equipped with weather instruments, and a brave complement of scientists and aviators, and they fly right through these huge storms to measure the winds, temperature, air pressure, etc. Weather forecasters use the data to get more accurate information on the strength and to better forecast the storms.

The folks at Tropical Atlantic, have put together Google Earth files letting you watch live hurricane recon missions, or see the results from recent missions. Right now, we have two tropical storms in the Atlantic: Tropical Storm Cristobal off Cape Hatteras, and Tropical Storm Dolly off the Yucatan peninsula. If you go to their special recon page, you can see links to their recon archive, or to the current live recon data for Google Earth. Once you open a recon file, you will see colored wind barbs which indicate the strength of the winds for the storm at that position as the plane flew through that part of the storm. A legend in the upper left gives you an indication to the strength of the winds based on the color. The wind barbs also indicate the strength by the number and shape of the barb for each position. And, finally, you can click on a wind barb with the left mouse button and get details on the reading for each position (which also includes, temperature, pressure, altitude of the plane, etc.).

This is a really cool way to get some insight on how weather forecasters gather their data for big storms. Tropical Atlantic also has a special Google Earth file which provides you with a wide range of weather data for Atlantic weather including satellite photos, sea surface temperatures, wind and wave analysis, and much more. That's why their collection is a part of the GEB storm tracking tools collection which gives you access to the best global storm tracking tools available for Google Earth.

Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:00 AM | Comments (1)

July 18, 2008

Links: Mandela 90, F-Secure, Departure, Fish in Arizona, 3D Cities, Japan, Maps

Not only some interesting GE files, but also some news buried in today's link roundup. Also, I will be somewhat distracted during the next month due to some travel, my two daughters starting college next month, and a big project I'm working on (which I'll be posting about here soon - well, within a couple of months). I still expect to be posting, but I may not catch everything. Thankfully, Stefan at OgleEarth is posting again, so keep an eye on him if you find I'm not posting at the usual levels for the next few weeks.

• Mandela 90 - Nelson Mandela turns 90 today. Tinus of VirtualAfrica has posted a Google Earth file that shows important locations in Mandela's life. Most of the placemarks contain panoramic photos of each location.

• F-Secure - F-Secure analyzes and monitors viruses, spam, and hacking activity on the Internet. They use Google Earth to visualize the spread of the viral computer activity in real-time at their operations center. They have released a KML file that lets you see a sample of their data showing the location spamming servers, computers broadcasting various viruses, and other malicious activity. The file has the IP addresses and other identifying information stripped for security reasons. I recommend watching the video they've released which explains how the real-time Google Earth data is used, and what it means.

• Departure - One of the developers who joined Keyhole in 2003 and came over to Google when they bought Keyhole and built Google Earth has decided to leave Google. Apparently he felt Google has changed now that it is a much larger company. You can read his thoughts at his blog (along with some interesting tidbits about Keyhole/Google Earth), and here is a CNET story on his departure. I guess someone leaving from Google in today's economy is pretty big news.

• Fish in Arizona - The Arizona Game and Fish department has created maps documenting the best boating and fishing locations. You can also view each of the Maps in Google Earth (link above each map) and get a 3D perspective on the terrain. Plus, with GE you can turn on layers like the Geographic Web (use the Panoramio photos to see what each location looks like), Places of Interest and many others to become an expert on what's available before you go there.

• 3D Cities - Google's Cities in 3D program bears some more fruit this week. Google has published several new cities in Google Earth which participated in the program. Turn on the 3D Buildings layer and visit some of the new cities (well, some are towns): Amherst, MA; Greenville, SC; McMinville, TN; Nanaimo, British Columbia; Nashville, TN; Washington, DC; and Jamestown, NY (not yet in the layer). Also, Google published a post on their blog where the GIS folks in Washington explain why they chose to participate in the program.

• Japan - Last week, Google slipped in a new tourism layer for Japan. The layer is found under: Gallery->Travel and Tourism->Japan Tourism.

• Maps - In the online mapping technology - Where 2.0 - world there is a growing camp of folks who believe mapping data should be free. Since GPSes are becoming commonplace, and technologies for mapping are becoming easier to use, folks have been banding together and creating their own map data. The OpenStreetMap folks are the premiere example. Much of the mapping data in Google Earth has been licensed from commercial sources, but Google began over a year ago to collect and publish map data for places where no commercial source existed. At this point, Google is only allowing people to view that data for free on their mapping tools. Brady Forest of O'Reilly writes an excellent post summarizing the situation after talking to Google.

Posted by FrankTaylor at 07:03 AM | Comments (1)

July 17, 2008

Radiohead in Google Earth

On Monday the music group Radiohead released a new music video called "House of Cards". They teamed up with Google who helped them with the use of technology in the video, and through promotion on YouTube. The video uses a very creative use of LiDAR technology to show a live 3D scan of the face of the singer, Thom Yorke, and projects it in 3D while he sings. To further increase the promotion, Google created a web site to share a sample of the 3D data of RadioHead. You can view the data in a 3D viewer Google provides. And, they created a YouTube group for people to share videos of how they applied the data for other applications.

I'm not surprised to find out someone quickly took the data and imported it into 3D placemarks into Google Earth. There's no real reason to do this except that Google Earth is a great 3D visualization tool, and it's just a cool idea! The port to Google Earth was posted at the blog Swordpress. You can download it in Google Earth yourself, or you can watch this YouTube of it:

via OgleEarth.

Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:10 AM | Comments (2)

July 16, 2008

Best Google Earth Interface Videos

There have been many innovative new types of computer interfaces in the last few years, and Google Earth seems to be one of the most popular apps for trying them out. We've seen everything from ping pong balls to the latest Wii Fit board used to drive Google Earth. Below is the most comprehensive collection of different interfaces demoed with Google Earth (note: I've included links to more background where available). Note that some of these demos are done with built-in interfaces or with inexpensive items you can get, or make, yourself. Read the stories for more details.

Super Touch Screen - by Perceptive Pixel (see GEB story):

Keep reading below the fold for more videos:

Continue reading "Best Google Earth Interface Videos"

Posted by FrankTaylor at 02:36 PM | Comments (2)

July 15, 2008

GIS Data for Canary Islands in Google Earth

The Canary Islands Spatial Data Infrastructure (IDE in Spanish) has released Google Earth access to some of its geographic data. Right now you can get multiple zoom levels of detail for Topographic Maps 1:5.000, Streetmaps, Vegetation Map, Land Use Map and Protected Areas Map. And, they plan to add more maps in the coming months. The maps were posted at the Google Earth Community by Jorge Rosales. You can download the Canary Islands maps here . As you zoom in, more information will be queried from their server and then drawn as an overlay in Google Earth. The default map is the topographical map. You can look under the IDECanarias folder for other maps to view. Very nice data!

I'm a big fan of seeing GIS (Geographic Information System) data like this made available to the public. Many governments have either been reluctant, or have not had the funding, to make this type of data available to the public. The data has not always been easy to convert to new formats. Recently, the top GIS software manufacturer - ESRI - has made an update to their software which makes it easier to publish GIS data in KML. Hopefully we will see a wave of useful GIS data made public in the coming months.

According to Jorge, the Canary Islands KML "...uses a server side KML to WMS translator that maps user coordinates space in standard WMS requests. Main features are: continuous user view refresh (not only on view stop), works fine with high tilt camera angles (standard GE WMS support don’t work propertly), use Canary Islands SDI cache technology for fast response, multilanguage support (Spanish/English) and legend access (via standard WMS legend support)."

Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Urban Art Ultimate Goal: Google Earth

Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has done a couple of interesting large outdoor "urban art" projects. The first is a "Blue Road". He painted 1000 meters of road in bright blue in Drachten, The Netherlands - on top was the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters. The road was painted (using 4000 liters of paint) in April of 2007, and Hofstra hoped it would show up in Google Earth - but, the imagery for Drachten in GE is still dated 2005 currently (no new aerial or satellite photo has been acquired by Google for the area). I did notice the artist had some aerial photos taken of the road. I've placed one of the photos in a Photo Overlay for Google Earth - load this file and double click on the placemark to be flown into the Photo Overlay where you can see how closely the photo of the Blue Road matches the road in Google Earth. Try the transparency slider to check the underlying imagery.

More recently, in May of 2008, Henk Hofstra has done another outdoor art project called "Art-Eggcident". In this case he has created 100 foot wide fried eggs in a large square in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Some of the eggs even have 3D yolks kids can crawl on (see more photos). Amazingly, the city is allowing the art project to stay in place for the next 6 months. We can hope a proper orthographic aerial photo (straight down), or a satellite photo will capture this cool looking art project so it can be seen in the Google Earth images. But, in the meantime, I have again taken one of the aerial photos and made a Photo Overlay so you can see a photo of the Art Eggcident in its actual location in Google Earth.

This is just a reminder that if you do some large outdoor project you want to be visible in Google Earth. You can always take your own aerial photo and place it with the Photo Overlay or Image Overlay tools in Google Earth. That way it is still "immortalized".

Posted by FrankTaylor at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)

July 12, 2008

July 2008 Imagery Update for Google Earth

I've started getting reports of new imagery available in Google Earth today! The update is occurring as I write this because not everyone is seeing the new images yet, but it will probably be fully deployed within a few hours. Here are a few places I've confirmed (I will update this list as people tell me about other places - leave comments below please):

[UPDATED 1130, 1143, 1150, 1410, 2220 EDT - Thanks to all the input from GEB readers around the world!]

[UPDATED July 15: Wow, looks like GEB readers got it right. Check out the official details on this imagery update from Google (a pretty close match to our list - actually, ours is a little more informative).]

• Catalonia/Spain - My story about 3D Roses is a popular story right now, and that's where people first started reporting the new imagery. The entire Catalonia area has new imagery mostly dated September 2006 by the Institut Cartográfic de Catalunya. Also, Murcia, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada, Cuenca and Cáceres (see comment below). Also, Valencia. Also: Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona
• Portugal - Looks like areas in Portugal have new imagery.
• Czech Republic - entire country has Spot Image (medium resolution 2.5 meter)
• Slovakia - entire country with Spot Image
• Hungary - entire country with Spot Image
• Croatia - Notheastern part
• Australia - All of western Australia has Spot Image as well! Also, some new low resolution imagery for the Great Barrier Reef area off North Eastern Australia (see dark colored imagery). Adelaide, Brisbane, Tasmania
• USA - Looks like all of New Mexico has high resolution now. Credits to NMR GIS dated July 2005.
• Mexico - Central Mexico has Spot Image imagery
• Italy - Rome, Naples
• Venezuela - Maracaibo (Thanks Gerardo!)
• Germany - center of Munich
• Canada - Quebec, Southern Ottawa
• California - Areas around San Francisco, San Diego, Benicia, Solano County, Monterey, Palo Alto, Los Angeles (unconfirmed)
• England - Bristol, Worcester, Evesham
• Cote d'lvoire - Bouaké

You can confirm whether the imagery is new by clicking on the "View in Google Maps" icon in GE - the imagery in Google Maps isn't showing the new data yet. If you find new areas not in my list above, please leave a comment and I'll update the list.

Posted by FrankTaylor at 10:54 AM | Comments (45)

July 11, 2008

New Google Earth 4.3 (beta) Available - Version 4.3.7284.3916

There's a new version of Google Earth 4.3 (beta) available. This release does not appear to introduce new features, but it does address a number of issues some of you have encountered with GE 4.3 which was released in April. Since Google has had a couple of months, I'm expecting this version to be a more stable version to use. I'm still waiting for an official report and release notes, and will add the details here when they are available. See the official release notes for this update below. There's a lot of fixes to a variety of problems - many that only applied to certain OSes, or system configurations. Head on over to the official Google Earth Download page to get the latest (the "Check for Update" currently won't find this new release.)

See the initial review of Google Earth 4.3 for reasons why you should get the new version if you are still running an older version of Google Earth. Or, check out the GEB video demo of GE 4.3:

Continue reading "New Google Earth 4.3 (beta) Available - Version 4.3.7284.3916"

Posted by FrankTaylor at 09:46 AM | Comments (16)

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