Last week we released a KML showing the cities covered by the new type of 3D that Google has been producing.
We thought it would be interesting to see how much area has been covered.
Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D in Google Earth
Google Earth, does not have any built in feature to allow you to work out the area enclosed by a polygon. Google Earth Pro does have this feature, but only displays it for the selected polygon, so recording each of the 487 areas we have found so far would be quite tedious. Luckily, we found a helpful site, Zonum Solutions, which was able to take our KML file, and produce a list of areas. We compared the results of one or two of the areas with Google Earth Pro’s answers and found slight discrepancies. For the purposes of this post it doesn’t really matter, but if you use the above website for anything more serious it might be worth investigating which is the most accurate. We then got the country areas and US state areas from Wikipedia.
Interesting facts:
- Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D Imagery.
- Vatican City has 100% coverage due to it being a very small country contained inside the 3D area around Rome.
- The US has nearly three quarters of all the worlds 3D imagery.
- California has the most 3D imagery of any US state.
- Alaska is the only US state with no 3D imagery.
- Africa and continental Asia, have no 3D imagery.
- So far, approximately 0.06% of the Earths land area has 3D imagery.
Notes on the data below:
Some of the recent additions by readers of GEB are not included.
The fact that many of the areas include water, including parts of sea, was ignored. The country and state areas quoted are for land and water bodies within the country.
Areas that cross country borders or state borders, was not dealt with, except for two exceptions:
- Vatican City was counted, but its area not subtracted from Italy’s area.
- New Jersey, which shares two large areas with other states which are attributed to those states, was estimated, but not subtracted from those states.
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About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Hi Timothy, since you’ve gone to the effort, maybe include the sq.km or sq.miles (or both) in the Info field for the Outline & Placemark? Cheers, Andrew
Very interesting statistics Timothy! Thanks for pulling this together. I think its worth noting that obviously Google has done a lot of flying and processed an enormous amount of data to have covered so much area in 3D in the past two or three years. Wow!