EarthGamz is a new site which is focused on connecting “…people to their passion of sports through the power of place”. Naturally they started by producing a way to view sports information related to the Beijing Olympics. They have created an Earth plugin 
so you can view their Olympics information. They have placemark details on athletes showing their home town, the hundreds (probably thousands) of placemarks are organized by country or by sport. With the plugin there are simple buttons and drop-down menus to make the selections. Also, they have marked the venues in China visible in 3D through Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer. There is also a KML file , but this file only shows US athletes – the plugin has more complete data for lots (if not all) the participating countries.
EarthGamz also has a Facebook application for the Olympics and their site describes plans to involve social networking with their sports viewing applications. They say they will have a new “Top 100 Golf Courses in 3D” application released on August 19th. I like the idea of leveraging Google Earth’s technology to create sports-focused geospatial information and tying it to social networking. Their first release for the Olympics is pretty slick!
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.
Leave a Reply