New Scientist Tech reports today on an interesting forthcoming application for Google Earth. This is something we really haven’t seen yet for Google Earth. Bernie Krause has spent 40 years in the wild collecting sounds of birds, whales, wind, surf, animals, melting glaciers, and more. His Wild Sanctuary web site gives you a taste of what he has collected. Now Bernie says he wants to make more people aware of human activity on the environment by showing the sounds tied to location. I think this is a great idea. It would be especially effective if there is an elegant way to start up sounds by simply clicking on a placemark..
Krause plans to show 26 different sounds at a demonstration during the Where 2.0 conference – which starts on May 28th. I will be attending, and will definitely report on this when it is available.
The same article mentions the Freesound project has some geotagged sounds. But, the network link for GE doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
Is posting video in placemarks right around the corner or no?
That is actually pretty cool! What a brilliant idea. I hope that they add the sounds soon. Thanks for sharing!
I have posted KML bookmarks with live webcam stream and it works fine.
Example: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=767275
Shows live streaming webcam video of a building of the new IT College in Tallinn, Estonia. Open the bookmark in GE to see a truely live real-time stream. So I guess video posting (embedded YouTube videos in GE bookmarks) cant be too far away.
Actually, image animations in HTML have been supported for a long time in GE. You can even create an image overlay of your web came photo and lay it on the ground.
What’s needed is support for basic javascript code for Placemark descriptions. I’m pretty sure Google will be supporting it in GE soon since they implemented it for Google Maps recently.
It’s only a matter of time before people start building fully emmersive experiences with Google Earth using visualization dome monitors and intuative 3D controllers.
Oh wait. They’re already doing this too!
Sorry, Frank. I just get a kick out of how much people DON’T know about what’s being done by some rather visionary people out there – with Google Earth.