« June 2011 | Main | August 2011 »
July 29, 2011
Preview your seats for Paul McCartney's Wrigley Field show by using Google Earth
Paul McCartney is in the middle of his brief "On The Run" tour, performing in various North American stadiums to huge crowds.
In a few days (this Sunday and Monday) he'll be playing in Chicago's Wrigley Field, and concept3D has built a really neat tool to help show you what the view will look like from your seat.
It reminds me a bit of Room77, which allows you to preview your hotel room in Google Earth. As Google Earth continues to become more realistic, especially with 3D buildings and trees, tools like these will likely become more common and more useful.
One of the best parts of this Wrigley/McCartney model is the drop-down menu in the KMZ file itself. If you expand (+) the folder once it's loaded in your "Places" sidebar, you can click the section where you'll be sitting and the camera will automatically fly around to show you what your view will look like from that section. You can get the KMZ file here
, but be warned that it's quite a large file at around 10MB.
If you don't wish to load the full file, concept3d has created a short video to show you around the model:
We've shown you some of concept3d's work in the past, including the excellent 3D Virtual Campus at Northeastern University. They're a custom Google Earth modeling shop, and certainly a good one to contact if you need some 3D work done for a project.
I hope to see more of this kind of work done for various events in the future, as it's a grea way to preview what kind of view you'll have from your seats.
Posted by mickmel at 8:05 AM
| Comments (1)
July 25, 2011
StrataLogica: Google Earth in the Classroom
Since the very beginning, Google Earth has been seen as a powerful tool for education. Over the years, we've seen great examples of this with things such as the General Motors Education Project, TeachingHacks and many others.
StrataLogica is another great example of this. StrataLogica has taken the Google Earth API and wrapped it in a unique package that is ideal for classrooms to use via projectors and interactive whiteboards. Here's a quick video showing what they do:
As you can see, they've developed a great way to showcase the materials that they used to have to print and ship to each school. While you can certainly just use Google Earth in the classroom (yes, it's allowed), the StrataLogica interface will make it a much richer experience.
Have any of you used their product (or anything similar) in a classroom before? It seems like it'd be a great interface.
(via Google Enterprise Blog)
Posted by mickmel at 10:03 AM
| Comments (1)
July 22, 2011
The 100th anniversary of the discovery of Machu Picchu
This Sunday, July 24, Peru is celerating the 100th anniversary of the Discovery of Machu Picchu, the Inca city declared one of the new seven wonders of the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
As we showed you last year, the site was beautifully modeled in 3D by Peter Olsen.
To go along with the awesome 3D model, there are a variety of other sites that show off the area in amazing 3D. While this site is in Romanian, you can work your way through it using the arrows at the bottom of the screen and clicking on various parts of the complex.
More impressive is the Quest3D model of the site, though you need to install a special program to make it work which will probably turn quite a few people off.
Ultimately, Peter's Google Earth model is still the best way to see how amazing Machu Picchu really is. You can fly to it using this KML file, or watch the video below for a quick look at what Peter constructed.
Posted by mickmel at 6:46 AM
| Comments (8)
July 21, 2011
A Google Earth memorial for Andria Ruben McCool
Last month, Google lost one of their own when Andria Ruben McCool passed away unexpectedly. Andria was around since the Keyhole days of Google Earth, and she was a a driving force behind the impressive "Crisis in Darfur" layer that Google introduced in 2007.
As a sharp-eyed GEB reader discovered recently, Google has built a simple in-Earth memorial to Andria in the form of a labeled body of water, as shown here:
You'll need to make sure to have "Water Bodies" checked inside of your layers section (Borders and Labels --> Labels) to see the text. Here is a KMZ file to fly you to the exact location.
It's nice to see Google honor her life like this, even if it's a very small token. As far as I know, this the first memorial of this kind in Google Earth. Have you ever seen anything like this in Google Earth before?
Posted by mickmel at 7:35 AM
| Comments (0)
July 20, 2011
Modeling the Harrisburg Capitol Complex
As I've mentioned on here on GEB a few times, I love high-quality 3D models. I think they add a lot to the Google Earth experience, and I enjoy highlighting users that create awesome models.
In the past we've shown you work from people like Andy Dell and companies such as Estate3D and CyberCity3D. Today I want to show you some of the work from Steve Cline of Urban 3D Modeling.
He lives in Harrisburg, PA and built out much of the downtown area in 3D. In his words:
"As a resident of Harrisburg I wanted to show off the beautiful architecture and history of our state capitol complex. All the state government buildings are clustered into a dense complex that is bisected by State Street. The principle entrance from the east is the State Street Bridge which passes through two towering pylons as you enter directly into the Capitol Building and surrounding complex. Most of the complex buildings are a mix of neoclassical design and some art deco influence from the later additions. Of the 15 buildings in this collection my personal favorites are the Keystone Building, Judicial Center, and Forum Building. The only building not done by me was the previously done Capitol Building."
You can find all of the models in Google earth, and he's also put them together in a collection in the 3D Warehouse. For a quick look at all he's done, you can use this KMZ tour to fly around and see it all.
For more on Urban 3D Modeling, you can check out their website, follow them on Twitter or connect with them on Facebook.
If you know of other great 3D modelers that deserve to be highlighted on here, please contact us and let us know!
Posted by mickmel at 6:56 AM
| Comments (5)
July 19, 2011
Explosions in Google Earth
Paul van Dinther has done a lot of cool stuff with Google Earth, including putting out the excellent game "Ships" and "Drive the A-Team Van", among others. He has also done a good bit of work in building and testing new ideas to stretch the Google Earth Plug-in to its limits. He recently built a tool to test the performance of the plug-in in various browsers, and now he's back with a neat demo to show how to render text and animated bitmaps using the plug-in.
You can try it for yourself on his site. As he mentions on there, you'll likely get better performance out of it if you use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer with the demo, as Google Chrome has some speed issues when working with the Google Earth Plug-in.
Paul has also created a video to show how it works:
I expect we'll see some great uses of this technique in the near future -- probably from Paul himself!
Posted by mickmel at 7:14 AM
| Comments (1)
July 18, 2011
South Sudan is on the map, and now it's in Google Earth too
A few weeks ago, South Sudan became the 195th country on the planet, but that wasn't reflected in Google Earth until now. Stefan at Ogle Earth made some interesting comments about it when the new country was introduced, including:
• Why wasn't Google ready for it from day one?
• What will they do about the disputed border areas?
They delay may have been so Google could sort out the border issues. As Stefan suggested, Google has included a red border on parts of the country to indicate the disputed borders, as seen here:
The red area on the center of the northern border of South Sudan is Abyei, which right now belongs to both Sudan and South Sudan. However, I'm not sure of the story on the red disputed area along the western border.
To see the new country for yourself, simply search for "South Sudan" in Google Earth and it will fly you directly there.
Posted by mickmel at 7:29 AM
| Comments (6)
July 16, 2011
New Google Earth Imagery - July 16
Thanks to sharp-eyed GEB reader 'Andy', we see that Google has just pushed some fresh imagery into Google Earth. It's been a longer delay than we normally see between updates, but it looks like it might be a fairly substantial one!
As is usually the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn't in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what's new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they're not identical, that means that you've found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!
[UPDATED - 16-July, 11:417am EST]
- France: Autun, Morhange
- Germany: Picher, Rastow, Samerberg, Wobbelin
- Greece: Chametoulo, Ierapetra, Kymi, Santorini Island
- Mexico: Various -- thanks 'augusto'
- Poland: Lanieta
- Romania: Various -- thanks 'twist3r' and 'spiderpc'
- Spain: Aranda de duero, La Carolina
- United States: Idaho (Boise) and New York (Manhattan, Syracuse) -- thanks 'AndreasK' and 'Jonas'
If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!
Posted by mickmel at 6:51 AM
| Comments (48)
July 15, 2011
Tracking the Space Shuttle in Google Earth
The space shuttle Atlantis is currently in flight on the program's final voyage after launching from Cape Canaveral a few days ago, and NASA is providing some excellent tools to help track the shuttle in space.
Fist, they've provided a replay of the STS-135 ascent, including quite a lot of data about the shuttle as it lifted off.
Even better, they've also provided a live tracking file that updates every few seconds so you can follow the exact location of the shuttle.
While this is the end of the shuttle program, NASA has a variety of missions planned for the next six months, including unmanned journeys to Jupiter and Mars. Hopefully they'll provide this kind of data for those flights as well.
On a side note, I was made aware of this by Rob Mayeda on Google+. While Google Earth Blog isn't yet allowed to create a profile over there (only humans for now), I share Google Earth-related material fairly often and I'd love to connect with you on there. If you need an invitation to access Google+, you can request one from this site.
Posted by mickmel at 8:08 AM
| Comments (2)
July 14, 2011
Did Street View capture images of Phillip Garrido riding down the road?
The story of Jaycee Dugard's kidnapping has been all over the news lately, and it appears that Google's Street View cars happened to capture quite a bit of imagery of her abductor, Phillip Garrido. Thanks to GEB reader Bill for sending in the tip.
You can read Jaycee's story on Wikipedia (or almost any news site), but the short version is that she was kidnapped in 1991 and wasn't found for 18 years! Police visited Garrido's house various times over the years, but never looked in the back yard where Dugard was being held.
Viewing the home in Google Earth (KML) doesn't show much, but if you switch to Street View mode you'll see Garrido pull out of his driveway and follow the Street View car down the road.
To get that close-up shot of him, continue south down Walnut and then west on Bown until you reach Viera Ave. At that stop sign, he gets right up behind the StreetView car as shown above. Of course, there's a chance that this isn't Phillip, but it seems quite likely that it is -- it's his van, coming from his house, and it's a male driving.
There have been a handful of famous people (possibly) spotted in Street View, but this is certainly one of the most high-profile. For other interesting sites in Street View, check out StreetViewFun or the Street View section on Google Earth Hacks.
Posted by mickmel at 10:24 AM
| Comments (11)
July 13, 2011
What am I allowed to do with Google Earth?
We get emails quite often from readers asking about permission to use Google Earth data in various projects. Unfortunately, we're not in a position to answer those questions, and Google typically refers users to simply review the Google Earth Terms of Service.
Now there is a much better answer -- the Geo Permissions Website. It uses a simple wizard interface to walk you through your project, then helps you determine if that action is permitted with the Google Geo product that you selected (Earth, Maps, etc).
Here's a quick video that shows how it works:
Hopefully this nice new tool will help you as you continue developing amazing projects using Google Earth!
Posted by mickmel at 8:46 AM
| Comments (3)
July 12, 2011
Watching trees grow in Google Earth
While Google Earth is often used to show past and present conditions on Earth, it's rarely used to see the future. We've seen cool sites like the Blue Marble 3000 and the University of Corsica's ForeFire, but most focus on showing what we know about right now rather than showing what could happen in the future.
That brings me to Michael Gerzon and his neat idea to use Google Earth to show projections of forest dynamics, both in terms of tree growth and the spread of potential forest fires.
On his site, you can run a few sample demos to see how things work. It's not using real GIS data at this point, but it's a neat demonstration and I think it's the first I've seen that shows tree growth in an area.
Expanding the idea out, there are some fun possibilities. For example, you could show what an area would look like after xx years of tree growth, maybe in a new housing development. Combined with 3D buildings, it could be very powerful.
If you see a site that makes use of this (or similar) technology, please let us know.
Nice work, Michael!
Posted by mickmel at 8:18 AM
| Comments (4)
July 11, 2011
The world's longest bridge over water, now open and in Google Earth
The world's longest bridge over water, connecting China's port city of Qingdao with an airport on the other side of Jiaozhou Bay, has finally opened. The bridge is 26.4 miles long, making it the longest bridge in the world.
The building of the bridge has generated some amazing statistics:
• It stands on 5,200 pillars.
• It cost around $1.5 billion to build.
• It uses enough steel for almost 65 Eiffel Towers - 450,000 tons, along with 81 million cubic feet of concrete.
• It can withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake, typhoons, or the impact of a 300,000 ton ship.
GEC member TomKjeldsen found the bridge in Google Earth, and added a few paths to show the bridge in the "open water" areas that don't show anything in there.
To see it for yourself, you can simply use this KMZ file.
The bridge will hold its title for about 5 years; in 2016, a 30 mile bridge is expected to be completed that links Hong Kong with Macao and Guandong province.
Posted by mickmel at 7:20 AM
| Comments (5)
July 10, 2011
Can't export to KML from Google Maps? Here's a workaround.
As part of the recent Google Maps redesign, the ability to export your map to KML was mistakenly removed. According to a post in the Google Maps support forum, the feature will be added back in to Google Maps as soon as possible. In the meantime, here's a workaround for you:
1 -- Set the map the way you'd like it.
2 -- Click the "link" icon in the top right corner.
3 -- Copy the link below the "Paste link in email or IM".
4 -- Paste the address into your address bar and then add &output=kml to the end of it.
The image below helps explain how steps #2 and #3 work:
No timeframe was given for the return of the KML link, but I expect they'll fix it fairly soon. Let us know if you have any trouble getting this workaround to work for you.
Posted by mickmel at 3:28 PM
| Comments (4)
July 8, 2011
New 3D cities released; Berkeley, Cologne and The Hague
Google has just expanded the 3D building count in three cities, adding tens of thousands of buildings in the process. The three cities are Cologne (Germany), The Hague (Netherlands) and Berkeley (California, US). Here's a shot of how Berkeley looks with all of the new 3D buildings:
While all three cities look great, the most interesting has to be The Hague. If you'll remember, there was a large workshop back in February where 60 people got together to help build out the city in 3D. The workshop must have gone quite well, because the city looks great!
Congrats to all of the users that participated in modeling out that city. Also, thanks to anyone else whose building showed up today as part of the update -- your hard work helps make Google Earth better for everyone!
Posted by mickmel at 8:04 AM
| Comments (2)
July 7, 2011
Mapping the World's Sea Turtles
Powered by a network of well over 500 people, the SWOT (State of the World's Sea Turtles) database is one of the most comprehensive global databases of sea turtle nesting sites around. You're able to view all of the data on a customizable Google Map, and as you'd expect, you can download a KML file to view all of the data inside of Google Earth.
The map is highly detailed and customizable, allowing you to filter by location, and it highlights both the species and colony size with various colored shaped icons.
The depth of data on the map is quite impressive as well, containing data for over 120 countries around the world. If you're familiar with the WIDECAST Atlas, the SWOT database includes their dataset in there and displays them together. All of the SWOT reports and non-interactive map data can be found over at www.seaturtlestatus.org.
If you're looking for more ocean conservation tools in Google Earth, you can check out these ocean biographic maps from a few years ago, or simply dive in and explore the ocean itself, a feature available since Google Earth 5 was released a few years ago.
Posted by mickmel at 8:11 AM
| Comments (0)
July 6, 2011
Exploring Virtual Kenya
Virtual Kenya is an amazing informational resource, offering materials in wide variety of formats including DVD for those with no internet access. Their goal is to help Kenyans in their educational and professional pursuits by giving them this high-quality spatial data.
The amount of data on the site is very impressive. Along with a variety of tutorials and their blog, they feature over 100 informational maps to give you easy access to their data.
Some of the maps are relatively simple, like their Proposed Small Hydropower Sites:
Others are more complex, such as the Average Monthly Rainfall for February map:
Beyond that, they showcase a variety of Google Earth tours on a few different topics. A good example of that is their Wildlife and Tourism Tour, which shows off the country using quite a few different KML overlays and simple 3D models. You can view that tour on their site, using this KML file, or by watching the video below:
In all, it's quite an amazing site! If you have data to contribute, they have a section of the site full of information on how best to submit it to them. To try it all for yourself, simply head over to the Virtual Kenya site and dig in.
Posted by mickmel at 7:47 AM
| Comments (0)
July 5, 2011
The Tour de France in Google Earth
The 2011 Tour de France has recently gotten underway, and Cycling the Alps has built some fun tools to help you see the conditions that the riders are up against.
We've shown you some of their work in the past, such as the great games that they added to the site earlier this year. Now they've combined that technology with the Tour de France and the result is quite cool.
They've gone through and created 3D tours, Streetview tours, profiles and games for every leg of the race. It's quite an impressive list. Here are a few of the highlights to look for:
Stage 8
There are two stages in the Massif Central which are going to be very challenging, including the last two climbs in this stage: Col de la croix Saint Robert and Super-Besse Sancy.
Stage 12
In the Pyrenees and the climbs of this stage are epic. The Tourmalet is the most famous one but Luz-Ardiden gets a lot of attention in the media as well.
Stage 14
Stage 14 in the Pyrenees is probably the most difficult stage in the race, with six significant climbs.
Stage 18
This years tour is celebrating 100 years of high mountain stages, and every race featured a climb of the Col du Galibier. This year they'll be climbing the pass two times; once from each side. In stage 18 they will even finish on the Galibier. This is the highest stage finish in the history of the Tour de France.
Stage 19
The next day they will climb the Col du Galibier from the other side, and all three climbs on the 19th stage are legendary.
There's an amazing amount of info on this site about the Tour, and the games make it fun to ride around on each stage. Congrats to the CTA team for putting this all together.
Posted by mickmel at 7:15 AM
| Comments (5)
July 4, 2011
Mapping the Peachtree Road Race in Google Earth
In just a few minutes, my wife and I will be heading to downtown Atlanta to run in the 42nd annual Peachtree Road Race, one of the largest 10K races in the world. There are expected to be 60,000 running the race this year, so it should be quite an event.
There are a variety of sites that have interactive maps of the course, and I've found MapMyRun.com is one of the best. Along with standard maps of the course, they also provide an elevation profile, which explains why many people run too fast during the first half of the race and burn out before the finish:
Of course, my favorite feature is simply being able to download the KML file and explore the course for myself. Atlanta has solid 3D building coverage, especially toward the end of the course:
The race is held every year on July 4th, which is Independence Day in the United States. If you'll be celebrating the holiday today, I hope you have a great time and stay safe!
Will any of you be running the race today as well?
Posted by mickmel at 5:26 AM
| Comments (1)
July 1, 2011
The Tribus Organum: An Illustrated History of the World
Robert Rosenberg recently emailed us to let us know about a very ambitious new project he's working on, called the Illustrated History of the World. In his words:
The IHW project is the Foundation's effort to bring together existing multi-media web content such as Google Earth, You Tube, and Wikipedia in order to create an interactive narrative of world history based upon the content of our Tables of Instances.
If things go as well as they're hoping, the result could be a very useful resource for teachers and students to help supplement their history and geography lessons.
As of now, the project is a bit cumbersome to load on your computer, as the main KMZ file is roughly 108MB! They're already working on ways to reduce the size of that, likely putting it into a network link so it can be loaded in smaller chunks as needed. The other advantage to using a network link is that the data can be automatically updated, rather than requiring the user to re-download it from their site.
You can learn more on their website at TribusOrganum.org. They've also started a thread in the Google Earth Community to help solicit more feedback.
If they keep making progress on this, it could be an interesting project to watch. Good work, Robert!
Posted by mickmel at 8:34 AM
| Comments (1)