Growing up in Michigan, I skiied a lot in the winter, but I don’t get out nearly as often now that I’m down in Georgia. For those of you more fortunate, Google put out a reminder that there are a lot of great ways to capture your adventures on the slopes to play back later in Google Earth.
The easiest way is to simply record your track. If you use an Android phone, the “My Tracks” app works great. For iPhone, “MotionX-GPS is a good place to start.
As an example, Google posted this video that shows a bunch of them skiing in Lake Tahoe a few weeks ago. It’s cool to see all of them zipping around on the slopes like that!
Frank did something quite similar back in 2006, posting his tracks from ski trips to Alta and Snowbird.
Of course, winter fun isn’t just limited to recording your ski trips. You can actually browse a few resorts in Street View, thanks to the “Street View snowmobile” that Google put together a few years ago.
If you want to do a bit of virtual skiing, you can try out Ski Earth that we told you about last September.
Lastly, we have a very cool visualization of the Cross Country Skiing World Championships that we recently held in Oslo, Norway. GEB reader ‘Jan’ let us know about a great video that uses the Google Earth Plugin and actually has animated skiers!
Because it uses quite a bit of Javascript to build the animations, it’s not available as a downloadable file. Still, it’s a very cool visualization.
Going skiing soon? Record your track, and share it with us in the comments area below.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
And while we’re talking Google Earth GPS animation tools, let’s not forget the ultimate (OK maybe not, but most of my users think it’s pretty good!) free PC desktop animation application StarTraX, for skiing, cycling, flying, gliding… whatever, from http://www.gpsanimator.com
Watch skier “Jason” at the 2:52 mark of the first video in the post. It’s certainly a GPS glitch, but he comes flying in from the right and goes off the edge of the mountain, never to be seen again… 🙂
Does anyone know if there is an app similar in nature for the Blackberry smartphone?
Very cool use of GPS trackers. Would be great for hiking journeys too.
I’d like to see GPS tracking used for a Mt. Everest ascent. It would be interesting to follow on a daily basis.
I believe the GPS device need active-GPS tracking system if you are hiking so please pay attention to what you buy.