Arctic Tern Tour | KMZ

For more, you can view all of their tours on the Encyclopedia of Life site.

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Posted by mickmel at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)

February 6, 2012

All Streets: Highlighting terrain by only showing the roads

What if someone were to create a map that showed every street in the country and nothing else? Fathom Information Design did just that, and the results are amazing!

It feels kind of like the city lights of Earth that we recently wrote about, as you can clearly see cities form without any kind of borders or other overlays in there.

What's even more remarkable about the "All Streets" map is how clearly the mountain ranges are defined. Simply by drawing in the roads, you can see them without any difficulty. A great example is the Appalachian Mountains, seen here:

You can view and/or purchase the map over on the Fathom website.

(via +Adrienne St. Aubin)

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Posted by mickmel at 8:39 AM | Comments (1)

February 3, 2012

Improved imagery of the Google Earth seafloor

To celebrate the three year anniversary of the release of the 3D Ocean in Google Earth, they've just released a major update to their bathymetry (underwater terrain) and it looks great!

Similar to their recent update "Pretty Earth" update, this one does quite a lot to help clean up stray artifacts and images visible in the ocean. A great example of that is Guam, seen here alongside the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the world:

Another noteworthy change is that "Atlantis" is now gone. A few years ago some people thought they had found the lost city of Atlantis, but it turned out to simply be sonar tracks from a ship. While that was a reasonable and accurate explanation, the sonar tracks were still pretty ugly on the surface of the ocean. They're now cleaned up as part of this update and the area looks as clear as it should:

To see more of what's changed, Google has created this short video to give you a tour:

Combined with the new patchless imagery, the earth is suddenly looking remarkably better all the way around. For more, check out this entry in the Google Lat Long Blog.

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Posted by mickmel at 6:46 AM | Comments (1)

February 2, 2012

The city lights of Earth

First released in 2007, the "Earth at Night" layer remains a very unique way to view the earth. Captured on the "dark side" of the planet, depending on the time of day, the images are a striking visual of the more urbanized areas of the planet.

However, the images were not easy to capture. For years, astronauts would try to capture the bright lights and only have blurry photographs to show for it, as the earth travels beneath them at 4.4 miles/second.

In 2003, Don Pettit developed an innovative system for capturing these images and he went on to capture over 2,500 photos, with thousands more captured in subsequent missions. You can read more about Don and his technique in this article at Air & Space Magazine.

To see the lights for yourself, simply click on the [Layers] in Google Earth, open [NASA], then [Earth City Lights] and click the button in there.. For the best results, disable your other layers and places to get a nice clean view of the earth. You should likely disable the atmosphere as well (under [View] --> [Atmosphere]), but I kind of like the glow it gives. It's a neat effect.

A big thanks to Don for pioneering this amazing technique, and hopefully as time goes on this imagery will become even higher-quality and more striking.

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Posted by mickmel at 8:08 AM | Comments (2)

February 1, 2012

Monster Milktruck is a great way to play in Google Earth

We first showed you the Monster Milktruck API demo nearly four years ago, but thanks to a reminder from the Google Earth page on Google+, I went back and played it a bit more. What a fun little game!

If you're not familiar with it, it's difficult to call it a "game" because it's actually just a tech demo; there is no objective, no scoring, and no way to lose a life. That said, it's remarkably fun to drive around various places in the world with just a few presses of your keypad. As long as you have the Google Earth Plug-in installed (which you most likely do), you can play the game here.

If you enjoy driving around in the milktruck, you'll really enjoy Paul van Dinther's Drive the A-Team van" game from a few years ago. It's the same basic idea, but with 3D trees, collision detection on the buildings, and missions to accomplish.

This is one of the great things about Google Earth; old games/files will automatically improve over time as better imagery and new 3D buildings are released!

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Posted by mickmel at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2012

Geocaching with Google Earth

We took our daughters (ages 5 and 8) on their first geocaching adventure this weekend and it was great! We used the very popular Geocaching.com website, which had quite a few Google Earth tools to make our adventure easier to plan.

In particular, they have a Geocache Google Earth Viewer that you can download and use. It's essentially a network link that shows all of their geocache locations in Google Earth -- over 1.6 million of them!

It was quite handy to fly around in Google Earth, find local caches, then click to see if they were worth checking out. We eventually stumbled upon a local "challenge" (10 locations to find, including this one) and had a good time.

While the icons are clickable, I would like to see them have a bit more info. In particular, the "last found" date would be helpful, so you could quickly see if a cache was likely to still be in place.

They also integrate Google Earth by allowing you to create "routes" that are generated by uploading KML files.

For all of you geocachers out there, what is your favorite way to search for new caches to find?

Posted by mickmel at 8:03 AM | Comments (3)

January 30, 2012

Google SketchUp for Game Design

We talk about Google SketchUp quite often on here, and for good reason. It's an amazing piece of free software that allows you to create 3D models for use in Google Earth and other places.

We've shown you a few SketchUp-related books in the past (such as "SketchUp for Dummies"), but Robin de Jongh of sketchupuser.co.uk has written a book that might be of great interest to some of you: "Google SketchUp for Game Design".

The book covers some SketchUp basics, such as texture creation and modeling, but then gets into some cool game-specific sections such as:

• Sketching out the level.
• Importing to a professional game application (Unity 3D).
• Setting up your character controller.
• "Fencing" areas of your creation.
• Creating a realistic car with SketchUp.
• Exporting your game for others to play.

The book is full of screenshots and step-by-step tutorials to help make things as clear as possible. If you've ever had an interest in developing 3D games, this book would be a great way to get started.

You can pick up a copy of "Google SketchUp for Game Design" from Packt Publishing or on Amazon (including a version for Kindle).

Also, as always, if you build a noteworthy 3D model in Google Earth using SketchUp, please let us know about it so we can check it out for ourselves and perhaps feature it on the blog.

Posted by mickmel at 8:03 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2012

An amazing 3D tour of the Costa Concordia

Last week we showed you the fresh satellite imagery and tour of the wreck of the Costa Concordia. It was a great file that helped to show what happened, but now Peter Olsen (who just days ago unveiled the excellent Terra Nova models) has built an incredible 3D tour of the wreck, with the entire journey animated!

The speed has been increased to save time, so you don't have to wait 2-1/2 hours for it to finish, but it's otherwise as accurate as possible. To see it for yourself, simply visit the Costa Concordia Disaster Animation page in the Google 3D Warehouse and choose the "View in Google Earth" link.

If you're not familiar with using Tour files in Google Earth, simply click the "Double-click me!" text on the left to get it started, then click the play button at the bottom to step through the introductory slides, as seen here:

Fully animated tours like this are a great way to recreate events, and Peter is one of the best around at creating them. A similar example you might want to check out is his recreation of the 1977 Tenerife Airport disaster from a few years ago. Great job, Peter!

Posted by mickmel at 7:09 AM | Comments (8)

January 26, 2012

Google Earth 6.2 Released with Google+

Google not only released all new more beautiful imagery of the Earth today, but they also released a whole new version of Google Earth - version 6.2. You can download it here. The biggest news is the integration with Google+:

Here is a quick list of the new features:

• Integration with Google+ - you can now sign into your Google+ account and you can Share your current view with Google+. This feature could have meant that your "My Places" content would be shared on different machines, but apparently they have not implemented that capability yet.
• New Search Interface - Google has made substantial changes to the way searching is done in Google Earth. The results look more like Google Maps. You can also now get walking and biking directions just like in Google Maps. Search results also happen dynamically. They have put a lot of effort to updating the search capabilities in Google Earth to bring it in line with Google Maps. The font is much bigger - actually, it seems a bit too big. You may need to increase the width of your sidebar to be able to read the results better. See screenshot below.
• New graphic rendering - Google has made changes including turning on anisotropic filtering by default.
• New Imagery in Google Earth Mobile version - The new version of the imagery of the Earth also appears in the mobile version of Google Earth.
• Improvements to Network Links - better handling of parallel loading of network links.

We will keep adding to this list as we find significant new features. More details from Google are available in the release notes.

Here is a screenshot of the new search results:

Posted by FrankTaylor at 1:51 PM | Comments (31)

Google Releases Pretty Earth

Google has just this morning released a new, prettier, version of the Earth for Google Earth. The short version is that it now looks much more Earth-like and less like a bunch of satellite and aerial photos patched onto a sphere. And, it really does look MUCH better!

Since Google Earth was first released in 2005, Google has made thousands of changes to their imagery. Changes to how the imagery looks (colors, contrast, lighting) when combined so it has a more pleasant look from space. One of the most frequent comments about Google Earth is "why are these ugly patches of rectangular images on the Earth?". Well, Google has released today a new attempt to address the problem.

Some of the changes Google has attempted to its imagery were not successful. For example when they attempted to cut images that showed away from the coastlines which removed a lot of valuable information. Google later provided access to that valuable imagery in in the historical imagery layer. Or the time they tried changing the colors in a detrimental way, which they quickly removed a few days later.

Today, Google has finally combined many different attempts, and suggestions from the Google Earth user community, and implemented a major change to the imagery that greatly improves the look of Google Earth. The most obvious change is that the "patchwork" of random-looking rectangles of imagery from different sources is no longer obvious. But, Google's new imagery is much more dramatic than is obvious. They have altered nearly all the imagery of the Earth and made major improvements to the contrast, lighting, and consistency of the imagery at all levels. And, they have used features inherent to Google Earth's abilities to transition at different zoom levels to smoothly move between imagery that is very pleasing to the eye.

These changes are subtle if you don't have access to the way things looked before.
Here are some comparison shots showing the dramatic change before and after in just a few places:

Before/After USA

Before/After Africa

Before/After China

As you can see, the improvement is dramatic when you compare the old to the new. But, once most people start using this, they'll probably quickly forget how it used to be and just accept the new look. However, we should really appreciate the huge effort Google has made to pretty up the Earth, and thank them for a job well done!

Posted by FrankTaylor at 8:01 AM | Comments (22)

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