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January 31, 2008

Video Tutorials for Google Earth

If you are just getting started with Google Earth, or are looking to help teach someone the basics, there are some short video tutorials developed by Googler John Gardiner (who is a documentation specialist on the GE team). John writes the Using Google Earth blog which periodically publishes posts on features of GE. So far he has published 5 short video tutorials on the basics of using GE.

The first video helps teach you the basics of "Navigating in Google Earth":

Here is the list of currently available short video tutorials:

• Navigating in Google Earth

• Searching in Google Earth

• Marking Locations in Google Earth

• Obtaining Coordinates in Google Earth

• Geotagging Picasa Photos in Google Earth

For more a more comprehensive collection of tips on GE, Google Earth Blog has a list of information and tips available in the GE Basics section.

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January 25, 2008

New Layer Goodness for Google Earth - January 2008

Today Google Earth got some substantial new layer updates. A quick summary of the updates are (read further for more details on where to find these):

• New roads layers for 26 countries!

• 2 million new photos to the Panoramio layer

• A substantially updated Earthquake layer, and link to the USGS Earthquake monitoring tool

• National Geographic Magazine articles for three more continents

• Other Regularly Updated Layers

For more details on what was updated and where to find them, keep reading below.

Details about some of these updates were posted at the Google LatLong blog today. But, I've got some other interesting information they failed to point out.

• New road layers - here's a list of the 26 countries added: Russia, Malaysia, Thailand, Aruba, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Place names in Taiwan, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Turkey. The roads will be labeled in their local language. Bodies of water will be labeled in the language you have Google Earth set to.

• 2 million new photos - Read all the details about the Panoramio layer update here.

• Updated Earthquake Layer - Some of you may not have been aware that under the "Places of Interest" layer folder there is a folder called "Geographic Features" and under that layer is an "Earthquake" layer. This layer presents historic earthquake epicenters of magnitudes greater than 3 for the entire world over the last 40 years. Google has updated the layer substantially (with help from the USGS), and not only that - the placemarks in this layer now link to the USGS Real-time Earthquake Monitoring network link (which I've written about many times).

• National Geographic Magazine - If you turn on the layer: "Gallery->National Geographic Magazine", you now get placemarks for three new continents: Europe, Asia, and South America. These placemarks point to locations of stories from the magazines many years of publication. The placemark descriptions show photos and snippets to the article and provide links to their web site for more on each story. Great stuff!

• Other updated layer - Google doesn't say it in their post, but they also update regularly many other layers like those found under the Geographic Web layer like the "Best of GEC" posts, and the "Wikipedia" layer. Not only that, but the YouTube layer is updating every day with videos which have been geotagged at that site! If you haven't checked out the "Gallery->YouTube" layer lately - check it out again. There's thousands of new videos in the layer since the last time you looked! Personally, I think this layer should be made part of the Geographic Web layer. It's a perfect fit.

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Panoramio Layer Adds 2 Million Photos

Eduardo has posted at the Panoramio Blog that their Google Earth layer (which is found under the Geographic Web layer folder in Google Earth) now boasts an additional 2 million photos! In November, they had increased the included photos to a total of 2.5 million. But, now the total is nearly double to 4.5 million photos! Eduardo notes in his post that they have now greatly reduced the lag between the time it takes to review photos posted at the Panoramio site - where they choose which ones get included in the layer. Also, they now have about 6.8 million total submitted photos at Panoramio. This photo collection is growing fast - and all the photos are tagged to a location!

So, turn on the Geographic Web layer in Google Earth (or open the folder by clicking on the "+" icon and turn on just the Panoramio layer). You will find more photos than ever all over the planet.
The Panoramio layer shows icons as little blue circles until you zoom in close enough where more icons may appear and the icons change to little cameras. Click on the placemark icons to see the photos. Click on the photos in the placemarks to visit the Panoramio site for full details and bigger versions of the photos. I find this an invaluable layer for getting a perspective about a place I'm interested in while viewing Google Earth. You not only get the satellite photos of GE, but also perspectives from many people all over the world for almost any location you can imagine. Sometimes the photos are very unique taken from planes, kites, sides of buildings, or even underwater.

Another way to view the photos included in the Panoramio layer is to download the Panoramio popular photos network link. In this version, the placemark icons are actually miniature versions of the photos themselves. Zoom in to a different location and pause for a few seconds and it will load a new set of photos from that location.

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Guys Fly Balloon to 30 km Altitude - See it in Google Earth

Apparently, flying high altitude balloons is an emerging hobby. A guy named Alexei Karpenko (and a team of others) managed to fly a helium balloon in Canada to 30 km above the Earth (you can see the sky is black and the curve of the Earth in the photos). You can read a full description of his project including lots of photos, video clips, diagrams of the equipment and more at his lengthy web page. He used GPS technology and cameras to track the balloon's flight and document the flight. But, the most important thing is that he created a couple of Google Earth files so you can see the path of the balloon as it ascended and descended. You have your choice of the flight with photos , or the flight with embedded videos . You really get a sense of how big the Earth is and how close the balloon got to space when you realize 30 km is high enough to get these pictures. If you watch the videos, you can see that the balloon is still getting blown around by the atmosphere at that altitude. (A balloon can only go so high before it's lighter than air characteristics don't work.) The edge of space (where the atmosphere ends and space begins) is typically described as 100 km for the Earth.

It would be really neat if he considered using the KML 2.2 PhotoOverlay feature to actually position each photo in the same orientation as the photo was taken. He does include a folder called "Timeline" you can turn on which includes a timestamped position indicator of the balloon trip so you can get a sense of the direction of the flight using the GE time-slider.

By the way, if you read his web site, they used the GPS technology to track the balloon and follow it in "chase cars" so they could find it when it landed. Apparently they design it so the balloon is burst to accelerate its descent (so it doesn't go too far away) and use a parachute to slow its final descent. On this flight it didn't properly deploy, but their payload was designed well and the equipment survived undamaged.

via RemoteSensingTools.com - Thanks for the tip Daniel!

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January 24, 2008

Accuweather Photo Calendar Winners in Google Earth

Accuweather.com blogger Jesse Ferrell posted about the recent selection of winning photos for their Friday Featured Fotos contest where Jesse looks at the Accuweather.com Photo Gallery and chooses his favorites. The cool part is that he decided to create a Google Earth file showing placemarks for the location of each of the photos he chose - which in this case will be used in their Photo Calendar. You can download the Accuweather Photo Calendar Winners for Google Earth. Click on the placemarks to see the photos, and click on the photos to see bigger versions of the photos. There are some nice weather photos in here, and its nice to see them in the context of the location where they were taken.

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January 23, 2008

Links: KML Wrap-up, New Orrery, Zip Scribble, South China Sea

• KML Wrap-up - Google writes up a nice summary of the progress made in the development of KML (the file format used by Google Earth. I particularly liked the links to a variety of useful KML documentation. For a basic overview of the KML format read: What is KML/KMZ?

• New Orrery - James has released an update to his Orrery for Sky at his Barnabu blog. The Orrery shows the relative positions of the planets as they orbit the sun. When used with the time animation of the planets in Sky, you can understand their motions better. The updated version lets you choose three different modes: The original (which shows all the planets at once - not to scale), an inner-planets only version, and an outer planets only version. Try the orrery here . Great stuff!

• Zip Scribble - James also has created an interesting Google Earth visualization showing connections between zip codes in each state of the US. The idea came from someone else, he just Google Earth-ified it. The first set shows a static display, and a day later he posted a time animation version which shows the scribble in sequence. Check them out here: Zip Scribble static , Zip Scribble time animated . It was also interesting to me to check out the more remote US zip codes in the Pacific (like Guam, Samoa, etc.).

• South China Seas - Got a message from Christopher Paterson of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that they have released a new Google Earth collection which describes the South China Sea Project. This project is focused on reversing environmental degradation trends in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand. The placemarks in the collection provide a lot of information. This looks like it may be destined for the Global Awareness layer in GE.

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January 22, 2008

Musicians in Google Earth

Someone at the Google Earth Community called 'Biggles99' has begun an ambitious project to collect placemarks showing the birthplaces of the world's musicians and composers, with details describing briefly their bios, pictures, and possibly even videos showing more information and the sounds of their music (Note: only the Windows version of GE will show embedded videos). Links are provided to more biographical information. The initial collection was released just a couple of weeks ago, and already there are dozens of musicians in a wide variety of genres. Response from the community has been enthusiastic. Read the thread of posts here. The author has indicated he plans to do a lot more over the coming months. Great idea! (Thanks to Delta102 for the tip)

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January 21, 2008

Neighborhood Boundaries in Google Earth

Last Friday I mentioned that popular real estate mapping site Zillow had released some data to the public domain which provides the outline shapes of 7000 neighborhood boundaries in the US. The data was released under a Creative Commons license for free as long as attribution is given to Zillow. I suggested that someone should try converting the data to a Google Earth KML file so we could view it GE. Well, Matt Fox of Google Earth Library, converted the Zillow data and put it up on his blog on the same day! Downloaded the Zillow neighborhood boundaries in Google Earth, then select the state you are interested in. Matt chose to avoid the risk of overburdening your memory by setting up where you can only view one state at a time. He also chose some colorful boundary polygon colors and made them mostly transparent so you can easily compare the underlying satellite photo data. I was a little disappointed in the Zillow data because in some states it doesn't even show real neighborhood data, and it is only available in most cases for large metropolitan areas. For example, in the Raleigh, North Carolina area it only shows regions - not neighborhoods. Anyway, thanks for the fast turn around Matt!

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January 18, 2008

Links: Zillow News, Virtual Volcanology, Design in GE, GearthHacks News, Ski Time, VE Geocoding

• Zillow News - Popular real estate searching site Zillow mentioned on their blog yesterday the release of their database of shape files for boundary lines for 7000+ neighborhoods (apparently the neighborhoods - not the individual properties) around the US. The release is made in the form of SHP files and they are released under a Creative Commons license. According to some blogs, the license allows this: You are free to use the files in this database in applications as long as you attribute Zillow when you use it. You may also make your own changes to the database files and distribute them, as long as you provide them under the same kind of license and give Zillow attribution. I'm hoping this means someone will take the shape files and make them available as a dynamic network link in Google Earth. You can find the Zillow data here.

• Virtual Volcanology - John Bailey of the Alaska Volcano Observatory (and one of the organizers of the AGU virtual earth sessions), was invited and gave a Google Tech Talk last month. His talk was titled: Virtual Volcanology - Exploring volcanoes in Google Earth. You can watch it now in YouTube. I particularly liked the short video he presented which starts about 42:00 into the talk.

• Design in GE - Richard Treves of the University of Southampton in the UK has posted the presentation he gave at the AGU conference last month. His presentation makes a compelling case to put some thought into the basic design of your visualizations.

• GearthHacks News - Gearthhacks.com has undergone some design changes. Mickey contacted me to let me know he has created a new tool called Yourmap to help churches create their own basic maps and embed their map on their web sites. It's a mapping mashup of Google Maps like many others,but the difference is that it is geared toward simplicity and it also supports Google Earth output prominently.

• Ski Time - A skiing enthusiast blogs about useful tools in Google Earth for skiing and encourages folks to remember to take their GPS showing the example of GPS tracks I did for Google Earth.

• VE Geocoding - Microsoft has blogged about an article in a Florida newspaper which did some tests of Virtual Earth's geocoding capability compared to Google Maps. According to the newspaper in their tests Microsoft trounced Google by showing the proper location for addresses in 341 out of 400 cases. The newspaper says this clearly shows the superiority of Virtual Earth over Google Maps. However, as one reader pointed out in the comments: "Regarding geocoding accuracy: It’s not fair to do this in one small area. Both GE and VE often get their data from local vendors, and for this area Microsoft probably just happened to get the data from the best vendor, whereas as far as I can tell, GE just uses interpolated addresses along the street centerlines for this particular area. As with their aerial imagery in some areas one is better than the other, and vice-versa." The Microsoft PR machine is in action. Here's some other interesting posts in recent days touting Virtual Earth uses in areas mostly dominated by Google Earth or Maps already: Local news stations, MyWeather site, YellowPages.

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January 17, 2008

Major Geek Cred

A video I created for this blog was shown today by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, on NASA Select TV during a lecture he gave at a NASA 50th Anniversary lecture series in Washington, DC! I had read somewhere that Eric Schmidt was going to be giving a presentation at NASA so I set up to watch it. Imagine my surprise seeing the Swiss Alps Fighter Tour video demonstrated! (NOTE: NASA is broadcasting Eric's talk again on NASA Select at 4:00 PM EST, it may be on again at 10 PM EST, and/or 6 AM EST)

Eric's talk started out by describing the ways Google is using some of NASA's data to do things like show the 3D terrain in Google Earth, satellite imagery, Hubble Space Telescope images in Sky, moon data in Google Moon, etc. Eric demonstrated (with help from Google Earth team member Robin Zeigler) several things in Google Earth including 3D buildings, the Hurricane Katrina time animation by Brian Flood, one of the several rising water animations, and my Swiss Fighter tour video. He also talked about the project that Vint Cerf is involved with to create an interplanetary Internet by linking together exploratory spacecraft. He urged NASA to architect their projects more like Internet projects in the technology industry. He thinks NASA should try many different smaller projects simultaneously rather than putting all their eggs in one basket with a single large mission. This way NASA has a much greater chance of success on risky missions. (Hopefully NASA will post an archived copy of the video of Eric's lecture - I'll post it here if they do.)

So, about the Swiss Alps video Eric showed: I created the video to illustrate how realistic the new Swiss Alps 3D terrain was in Google Earth by simulating the same flight flown by a real Swiss Air Force fighter pilot in another popular YouTube video. You can play the two YouTube videos simultaneously and see how similar the two videos look (turn off the sound on the second, Google Earth, video). By the way, this is how Eric had it demonstrated as well - both videos together:

Original

Google Earth

A little more background on the video: I dreamed up the idea shortly after the Swiss Alps 3D terrain was released in Google Earth. I wanted a way to illustrate how cool I thought the new data was, and someone had coincidentally sent me the Swiss fighter YouTube video. It took me like 8 hours to figure out all the places where the fighter flew, and to practice flying each sequence until I got a close approximation of the real video. My wife came in asking me what I was doing that was taking so long. And I told her - "Well, I'm making this video for a blog entry - and I'm hoping I'll get some geek cred for doing it. Maybe it will get a Digg or something.". The video was a pretty big hit and got something like 50,000 views in the first two weeks. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from one of the managers of the Google Earth project at Google who told me a funny thing. He said: "I just went to make a presentation on Google Earth to Eric Schmidt and as I walked in the door he says: 'Hey, did you see that cool video Frank Taylor made of the Swiss Alps?'." Eric Schmidt is well known as a geek himself, so I told my wife I definitely earned some major geek cred. This was about 9 months ago. So, I wasn't totally surprised to see Eric showing it at NASA - but, it was still a pretty cool thing to see nonetheless!

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Video Showing Variety of Google Earth Content

To illustrate the huge variety of the visualization capabilities of Google Earth during my presentation at the AGU conference last month, I created a video which is a rapid-fire slideshow of images from Google Earth Blog between August 2005 and the end of 2007 - 2.5 years of Google Earth in 2.5 minutes. Several people have asked to see it again. Unfortunately, the process of uploading this to YouTube has created quite a bit of compression artifacts. Since this is a slide show with a great deal of variety of content from one frame to the next, compression doesn't work well for it. If this video ends up being popular, I'll try to find a home for the less-compressed version. Of course, you could just re-read all 1300 blog posts and click on the thumbnails to see the images first-hand. :-)

The music in the background is from Tartan Rascals.

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January 16, 2008

Westport in Ireland Gets 3D in Google Earth

A week or so ago I saw some stories in the blogosphere about the town of Westport in Ireland getting a 3D version of itself in Google Earth to be released on January 16th. The stories said things like "Westport to be the first complete city in Google Earth". I didn't report on it because there were a lot of stories saying it was the first, which is not right. There are already some pretty impressive 3D models of large cities like Berlin, Denver, Las Vegas, Hamburg, Dresden, and even places like Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Anyway, I went and looked today, and sure enough if you search for "Westport, Ireland" in GE and turn on the "3D Buildings" layer it will begin loading a number of 3D models for the town. These buildings have high resolution photo textures which let you see and read signs on the fronts of stores, and even see merchandise in some of the windows. This also means they will take up a lot of memory, so make sure you have a good graphics card in your computer. Other interesting techniques in the collection is a detailed terrain base model for the town with the streets and sidewalks also textured and modeled. Even the bridges and water in a river are modeled.

According to some of the blog entries from last week, the models were created by AMT3D. The current models in GE are not a complete rendering of the town. It appears only a few blocks of three of the main streets are available at the moment. screenshots from the website of the modelers show they have more models available. So, I'm not sure why the GE version is not more complete. And, some of the other cities in Google Earth like those mentioned above have even more impressive collections of 3D buildings (both in terms of size and architecture).

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January 15, 2008

Surface to Air Missile Sites in Google Earth

In a project started almost two years ago, a Google Earth Community member named Sean O'Connor has been documenting the locations of Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites around the world by using the satellite and aerial imagery from Google Earth. This is a form of IMINT (IMagery INTelligence) normally performed by military intelligence personnel. But, now amateur analysts are performing similar work with public domain imagery. Only some of these amateurs seem to do a pretty good job. Sean has already documented, with help from other members of the GEC, nearly 1400 SAM sites. He not only identifies the sites, but also identifies the type of missiles located at each site and then uses colored circles to indicate the range of each missile site. See the collection here and select the "Range Rings" folder and the "SAMs by Country" folder to see the information. The collection is posted/maintained in a thread at the GEC here.

Sean has an interesting blog called IMINT & Analysis where he documents many other subjects of IMINT and performs other interesting military analysis using GE imagery. He calls his work "open source military analysis". An interesting concept I think. Recently he blogged about the techniques he uses to search Google Earth for interesting content. These are similar techniques used by myself and others to find planes in flight in the GE imagery. Sean has done some excellent work. And, he's only one of several military analysis enthusiasts out there.

If you are interested in finding other information about military related things found in Google Earth, read the two forums at the GEC: Military (moderated) and Military (unmoderated).

Here are some other interesting military finds people have made with Google Earth:

• Bizarre Scale Model in China

• Israel Lebanon Conflict Illustrated in GE

• China's Secret Nuclear Sub Base

• North Korean Bomb Test

• Nuclear Bombs in Google Earth

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January 14, 2008

Sky Layers Bug - Workaround

A few days ago, after the release of the large update to the Sky layers, I noticed some problems when trying to view the contents to some of the new layer folders. I would click on the "+" box to open the folder, but the folder didn't open. After some experimentation it turns out that if you change the "View:" option from "Core" to "All layers", then the problem goes away. Note: I had this same problem on both Mac and Windows versions of Google Earth. So, just change to "All layers" and you can view the layer folders like normal.

The bug has been reported to Google and they are working on a fix.

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January 11, 2008

Tracking Flights in Google Earth

Another excellent example of real-time network links in Google Earth was introduced over two years ago by FBOweb. FBOWeb specializes in tracking flights as a business providing information to general aviation operators so they can know when private flights are arriving, but they also cater to aviation enthusiasts and even just the casual user who needs to track a flight. But, they really did something cool when they introduced the ability to track flights in Google Earth. To showcase this capability, they created some special network links to show the approximate positions of all the in-bound flights for several major US airports. The tracks show the position as a placemark and a track of the last few minutes of the flight. And, they also show the altitude, so the tracks are 3D!

The list of airports include: Boston (BOS ), Chicago (ORD ), Atlanta (ATL ), Los Angeles (LAX ), and New York (JFK ). I highly recommend you turn off one airport's network link in the Places folder before you turn on the other (otherwise there is too much information). You can view the fboweb.com web site for these Google Earth files here. Also, make sure you tilt your view so you can see the 3D view of the plane tracks.

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January 10, 2008

New Features to Real-time Earthquake Monitoring

While I was attending the AGU conference last month, I spent some time with Scott Haefner of the USGS who is responsible for the USGS real-time earthquake monitoring add-on for Google Earth found on their Earthquake Hazards web site. The earthquake monitoring tool is one of my favorite examples of the power of the real-time geospatial information capabilities of Google Earth. The tool automatically checks the USGS database every 5 minutes and lets you know if new seismic activity has occurred somewhere in the world. Each earthquake is colored by age, and sized according to magnitude. It also shows the plate tectonic boundaries. For larger quakes, if you click on the placemark, you may get a link for a "shakemap" overlay. The shakemap is an image overlay showing the shaking intensity map for that earthquake.

Scott has added a cool time animation to the add-on (in part due to ideas we discussed). You can find the animation when you click on any of the earthquake placemarks. At the bottom of the description bubble you will see links like this:

The first shows you a time animation of the seismic activity from Magnitude 1.0+ for the last seven days. Drag the slider to watch the earthquakes occur in sequence. The second link shows you historic earthquakes since 1970 from Magnitude 3.0 and up. Warning, this is a big file and may take a while to load. But, it definitely gives you a perspective on where the earthquakes occur.

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January 9, 2008

Google Sky - The Next Generation (Updated)

Google has made a substantial update to the layers for Google Earth's Sky mode. Start up Google Earth 4.2, and select the "View->Switch to Sky" menu (or click on the button in the top middle to "Switch between Earth and Sky").

The new layer choices look like this:

The new layers include a new "Welcome to Sky" layer which provides a series of placemarks to tour the different features of Sky. Double-click on the Welcome to Sky layer and look for the "Saturn" placemark icon. Open it up to see links to a couple of tutorials on using Sky.

There are some new layer folders like:

• Current Sky Events - This layer folder includes some astronomy podcasts called "Earth and Sky" which have apparently been around for some time. Each podcast is placemarked to a location described in the story. The layer also includes "VOEventNet" placemarks which provides rapid-response information on night sky events.
• Featured Observatories - This new layer contains content from several layers including: Hubble (which was available previously), Spitzer Infared Showcase, GALEX Ultraviolet Showcase, Chandra X-Ray Showcase, WMAP Microwave Sky, and IRIS Infrared Sky. Some of these do complete image overlays of sky to show alternate imagery (in other frequencies) for our night sky. Recommendation: try them out one at a time.
• Historical Sky Maps - this new layer folder contains sky maps from David Rumsey's historical map archives. One does a full-sky overlay showing a historical map of the sky from the inside of the celestial sphere. It looks a little weird with the writing backwards since you're on the inside. It also appears to be in Italian. Also available are "Hevelius Constellations" which have the beautiful constellation illustration overlays (the same I mentioned were converted for Sky back in early October).
• Sky Community - this layer shares placemarks posted by people at the Google Earth Community forum for Sky.

There's a ton of new information in the new release. So, get out there and explore the Sky!

By the way, at the end of the "Welcome" tour of placemarks you get a placemark which links to James Stafford's "Real-sized Planets" add-on. You also get a link to the fun "Han Solo Escapes" 3D animation Joey Wade and I did last fall.

NOTE: While I was writing this, Google released their announcement about the update to Sky. I've made slight modifications to reflect the new information.

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Missed Opportunity - It's a Sign

A few weeks ago I was wondering what interesting things I might have flown over when I flew a plane out to New Mexico. I figured if I put the GPS track into Google Earth, turned on the GE Community layer, and zoomed along the track - I would see what things I missed during the trip. After a few minutes of searching, I suddenly realized I missed something I've wanted to see for years now! I missed LUECKE!

Some of you may have heard that a Texas landowner named Luecke decided to immortalize himself by selectively clearing trees on his ranch to form a 1 km tall, 4 km wide version of his name along the flight path from Austin's airport. See LUECKE in Google Earth . The name is so big, that NASA has been using LUECKE (see bottom of page) to measure the resolution quality of photos taken from space.

So, if you load up my GPS flight track in Google Earth , and then double-click back on the LUECKE placemark, you can see I flew almost dead-center over Luecke. How could I miss it?! First off, it would have been unlikely I would have seen it in front of me. The front-down visibility is cut off by the engine and instrument panel. And, because I went directly over it I would have had to been watching very carefully almost straight down to have caught it. The key lesson I took from this is that I should review my flight plans in Google Earth and make sure I look for interesting things I should be looking for before I make the trip. Of course, your flight plan is always subject to Air Traffic Control making changes mid-flight.

For those of you wondering, I went to New Mexico to see the X PRIZE Cup.

Also, here is a photo someone took of LUECKE from a plane.

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January 8, 2008

Navigation Gadget Tricks with Google Earth 4

The navigation gadget in Google Earth 4 packs a lot of functionality in a small space. In fact, there are some useful features which you may not have discovered. The nav gadget lets you control your view of GE in a number of ways. Did you know you can pan, zoom, rotate, and tilt with the nav gadget? You can also make the gadget itself appear and disappear with a wave of the mouse. Not only that, but you can reset your zoom, tilt and rotation very simply once you know the tricks.

Here's some details on the controls (including some tricks):

1. Panning Click and hold your mouse on the center gadget - which acts like a joystick. While holding and dragging the mouse it will pan your view. You can also click the little arrows around the center to pan in a specific direction.
2. Rotating - Click and drag the outer circle or the "N" button to rotate your view about the compass. The "N" is for north - so if it is on top, then north is up. Trick: - Click on the "N" button once and it will automatically reset to north up. Trick 2: You can also click the "n" key on your keyboard to reset.
3. Zoom - The slider on the right controls your zoom. Drag it up or down to zoom in or out. The farther you drag the slider the faster it zooms. Click the "+" or "-" buttons to zoom in or out at a set speed. Trick: DOUBLE-click on the "+" or "-" buttons to zoom all the way in or out to minimum/maximum. Trick2: Zoom in by double clicking your mouse on a place. Trick3: zoom out by double-clicking the right mouse button.
4. Tilting - The slider on the top controls tilting. Drag it right or left to tilt down or up. The further you drag the slider the faster it tilts. The buttons on either slide let you tilt up or down at a set speed. Trick: DOUBLE-click the buttons on the right or left to tilt all the way up or down at once. Trick 2: you can also hit the "u" key on your keyboard to reset tilt all the way up at once. Trick3: you can hit the "r" key on the keyboard to tilt up and north up at the same time. Trick4: it's even better to click and hold the middle mouse button in the 3D View (not using the gadget) to both tilt and rotate at the same time (read more).

More below the fold...

You can make the nav gadget disappear or appear by using the "View->Show Navigation" menu choices. "Never" makes it stay off, "Always" makes it stay on, "Automatic" is the interesting one. Automatic makes the gadget disappear when not in use. But, there is a trick to make this work: If you have "Automatic" turned on when you first start GE up, you have to move your mouse cursor over the upper right part of the nav gadget and back before it will automatically disappear (I didn't know this myself until recently). Wave the mouse cursor back to the upper right to make it reappear. This same behavior works with the time slider gadget with the same "View" menu choices. You can alternatively show just a compass (smaller than the nav gadget) by choosing the "View->Compass" option.

One final favorite little-known trick: You can zoom part way in by double clicking the left mouse button somewhere on the Earth, if you have two or more mouse buttons you can double click the right mouse button and zoom out part way.

If you want to learn other interesting things about using Google Earth, check out the "GE Basics" page here at GEB. Also, check out the Using Google Earth blog by a Googler named John Gardiner. And, don't forget the Google Earth User Guide.

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Posted by FrankTaylor at 8:52 AM | Comments (1)

January 7, 2008

Links: Waldo, Mouse Tricks, Route Builder, touchEarth, Uganda Googles

• Waldo - Josh Wilson, a GEB reader, creates a 3DWarehouse model of a building in Germany and decides to add a little "Where's Waldo?" easter egg. You'll probably wish you had a SpaceNavigator before you find it. I'll post a screenshot later after I give you a chance to look. Download his building here , or view it in the 3DWarehouse here. Here's a screenshot of Waldo in the model:

  

• Mouse Tricks - James Stafford has developed yet another cool KML at his Barnabu blog. This time he creates UK and Ireland Flight Maps, which uses a cool technique when your mouse floats over a selected city the paths show up to other destination cities. This uses a special tag in KML called the <StyleMap>. He points to a write-up by Jason Birch for more info.

• Route Builder - 3D Route Builder for Windows Version 1.0 has been released by Nick Kopp. This application lets you perform fine control with routes and paths (from GPSes) inside Google Earth. You can adjust altitudes and route points and much more. OgleEarth has an initial review, and I plan to give it a whirl soon. Here's a brief video showing some of its features.

• touchEarth - Google Summer of Code Blog posts about the efforts of Pawel Solyga to create an open source multi-touch API for touch screens. To highlight his efforts he of course creates a little app called touchEarth to test it with Google Earth (see video). He uses the Google Earth COM API to interface. I'm a little disappointed because in the video he only shows basic zoom and pan. No interfacing with the layers or placemarks which are the next logical interface. But, if its open source, I'm sure it won't take long for someone to implement an entire interface like what Jeff Han has done for Perceptive Pixel.

• Uganda Googles - Stefan Geens writes the story about how politicians in Uganda are looking to Google to help solve their problems with regards to geo-political boundary issues. Stefan has some pretty amusing observations about the whole situation. Somehow I don't think Google will actually help them the way they are expecting.

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Posted by FrankTaylor at 8:17 AM | Comments (2)

January 4, 2008

Google Earth Blog Stats for 2007

I've just reviewed the 2007 year-end statistics for Google Earth Blog (GEB), and it was again an amazing year. GEB had 10,017,165 page loads on the web site (this does not include RSS readers which amounted to over 5 million requests in 2007). There were also 5,778,657 unique visitors to the web site. I'm happy to report that the GEB readership continues to be very international - visitors came from 229 different countries. Largest in the US, followed by UK, Canada, Germany, India, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, China, etc. . Special thanks to Google Adsense for helping make it possible for me to dedicate the time to research/write this blog. Also, thanks to the many sponsors through Google Adsense, and a few direct sponsors on GEB. The biggest thanks to the Google Earth team for a great program and most importantly to the MANY GEB readers!

In 2006 there were 7,977,793 page loads, and 3,744,498 unique visitors for comparison.

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January 3, 2008

Is it 2008 Already?

While most of you were welcoming the new year, I was laid up with the flu and barely able to get out of bed. But, I'm finally on the mend, so I thought I would get a blog post or two out today. Here are some links to interesting GE content/news:

• Dragging Directions for Google Earth - A few months ago, Google released the very cool feature allowing you to intuitively grab your directions and re-direct your route to get it to go the way you want. That feature still isn't available in Google Earth, but Barry Hunter has written a cool little program that lets you grab the directions you create in Google Mpas, and view it in Google Earth. That way, you can use the 3D terrain and faster rendering to get a better feel for your route. After creating a route in Google Maps, simply go to the "Link to this page" and copy the link, then go to Barry's multi-destination routing in KML web page and paste the link. Then click on the "Get it now" button and you get a KML file back to view it in Google Earth.

• Clear Skies - Stefan at OgleEarth has discovered a very cool map mashup for those of us who enjoy looking at the night skies. Clear Sky Clock uses numerical meteorological data from the Canadian Meteorological Centre to predict when in the next 48 hours you might have good seeing conditions for areas in North America. And, as Stefan points out, you can get the resulting map in KML also so you can view it in Google Earth. Next time I get my telescope out, I will definitely try this out.

• Google Earth Multi-touch Screen - It appears Google Earth will be the application everyone will use to show off their new multi-touch screens when they first introduce them. Check out this story from engadget and you can see how sexy Google Earth looks on this large 52-inch screen. Try to look at the screen, not the show girl demonstrating it.

• Alaska Oil Field Development - Joey Wade has posted a KML file showing the growth of Oil Field development in Alaska (particularly highlighting the area of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge) from 1899 through 2050. His post also provides some other interesting data about the issues of oil consumption out-running the availability of oil.

• Chile Border Problem Fixed - Last April the news media picked up that some officials in Chile were upset because the border between Chile and Argentina showed a town of historical importance to Chile was showing up in Argentina instead of Chile. In one of the recent layer updates to GE, Google has improved the border and it now shows Villa O'Higgins on the right side of the border.

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