Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Mickey Mellen

Exploring kudzu infestation in the US

Living in the southeast United States, I’m very familiar with the vine known as kudzu. Introduced to the US from Japan in 1876, kudzu is spreading at an amazing rate of 150,000 acres each year. Kyle Kusch at Google Sightseeing has taken advantage of Google Street View imagery to showcase some amazing examples of kudzu growth.

kudzu

Thanks to Street View’s historical imagery feature, we can look back to 2007 and see the same building with virtually no growth on it.

less kudzu

Check out Kyle’s full post for many other amazing examples of kudzu growth. As always, Google Sightseeing provides a very helpful KMZ file so you can explore those locations for yourself.

You can also read the Wikipedia article about kudzu to learn more about it and how to combat its growth.

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.

Locations of famous movies in Google Earth

Eight years ago, Frank shared with us a neat KML file that showed the locations of famous movies around the world, and now the folks at SkyMoviesHD have compiled a great list of 30 locations using Google Earth and Street View imagery.

Recognize this baseball field from “Field of Dreams”?

field of dreams

Or this fire station from “Ghostbusters”?

ghostbusters fire station

They have a great collection of locations, but sadly don’t offer a KML to quickly view them all. However, most have pretty solid descriptions and should enable you to find them for yourself. Check out the full collection of them on the SkyMoviesHD site.

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.

Traveling through Romania and Georgia with Google Earth

GEB reader “fjk” recently biked through Romania and Georgia and did an excellent job of showcasing his trip in Google Earth.

biking

fjk and his friend visited Kutaisi, borjomi, Vardzia and various other cities. They recorded the trip via a Garmin 62s GPS unit, and then loaded all of the images into a single Google Earth file. It’s fairly large, at around 29MB, but it’s a fun file to explore in Google Earth. You can download that KMZ file here.

If you’re planning a trip to Romania and you’re a first time visitor looking for travel tips and what to visit, then here’s a list of the most important things we locals think tourists should know about visiting Romania. There are many interesting things to do in our country and we’re going to tell you everything!

On Romanian Friend you can book authentic and interesting tours and day trips all over the country with the best, handpicked guides, find lots of useful info to plan your trip and get help with planning your itinerary or creating a custom tour. We’re locals passionate about our country who want to help travelers discover the beauty of Romania while supporting responsible, local and eco-friendly tourism.

Travelling to Romania – our tip: the simplest, most convenient and reasonably cheap way of getting to Romania is a low cost flight: 6 low cost airlines fly on 7 airports in major Romanian cities from more than 70 locations in Europe. Tickets range from 40-100€ depending on how much planning ahead you do and flight time is usually between 1,5 – 3 hours. You can also travel to Romania by train from Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia or Thessaloniki or even from further away with changes. If you’re looking for an adventure, consider an Eastern European road trip or maybe something more relaxing like a boat cruise on the Danube River. Read more about travelling to Romania.

Getting around Romania might be a bit more challenging, but not necessarily difficult. We don’t have a lot of highways and travelling by car between major cities usually takes long hours due to high traffic on mostly one-lane roads (speed limit of 90-100 km/h). Almost all Romanian cities and even small villages have train stations but railway infrastructure is not the best and trains are sometimes unreliable, although they will get you to your destination reasonably cheap. For shorter distances (up to 200 km) consider a car or train, train or coach for medium (200-400 km) and internal flights for longer routes (Bucharest – Cluj or Timisoara). Visitors to Romania are well advised to have travel insurance before getting here. Have a look at our guide on getting around Romania.

  1. Weather, climate and when to visit Romania
    Romania has a temperate continental climate with the regular four seasons still largely present. Summers (June-August) are hot with 33-38 C degrees, winters (December-Feb) are cold -20-0 Celsius while spring (March-May) and autumn (Sept-Nov) are unpredictable as ever: cold in the mornings and evenings (8-18 C), warm and sunny during the day (18-26 C). Average rain, no spontaneous floods or draughts. Morning frost in spring, thunderstorms in the summer, foggy in autumn and snowy and freezing in the winter. The best time to visit Romania is anytime between early April – end of October, if you decide to go on winter you need to take appropriate clothing, we recommend the alpaca clothing material so it can keep you warmer than cotton.

Our favourite time of the year to enjoy Romania is autumn: a superb array of gold, brown and red will cover the woodlands, hills and mountains in the countryside – it is a wonderful, peaceful and picturesque sight to see that you will definitely enjoy!

trip in google earth

You can also view the embedded version on his website. It’s a great way to capture, re-live and share a trip like that.

 

Great work, fjk!

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.

YoubeQ adds new languages, vehicles, places and more

We first told you about YoubeQ nearly three years ago, and they’ve been hard at working continually adding features.

youbeq

You can try it all for yourself at youbeq.com or read below for their list of new features.

New languages

In this new version, we have introduced, for the first time, new foreign languages, besides English. Now, YoubeQ users can also choose either Portuguese or Spanish.

New vehicles

The new youbeQ enables its explorers to travel around the world with 13 different vehicles, from cars, motorcycles, to military or civil planes and even more means of transport such as the jetpack.

New Places

In order to help the travelers exploring the earth, we’ve pre-selected the 157 most interesting places around the world where they will be able to see other travelers exploring these areas with them.

Make miles to unlock

The new youbeQ is developed in order to entice the user to run more and more miles. The users who travel more, will be rewarded by unlocking new vehicles and places associated with each of them. The more miles you run, the richer the experience becomes!

Global chat

There is also a global chat where users may exchange opinions and tips about interesting places and other knowledge.

VOIP Call feature

Whenever you add another traveler as a friend, you may activate the voice connection with him. This allows you to have a completely immersive experience while you explore the earth together.

Direction arrow

If you click on the map on the left side (2D), you may add a destination. On the exploiter, you’ll see an arrow that shows you the direction to follow in order to reach the destination you selected. This destination can also be a user and can follow him while he is moving and you are exploring the map together.

Progression Score

The more vehicles you gather and the more unblocked places you get a better score. This together with a complete profile will contribute to improve your score, estimated between 0 and 100%.

New sound engine

The new youbeQ also brought a new sound system that will increase the immersive experience you obtain when you explore the earth.

New physics engine

The new physics engine of youbeQ is a complete revolution. It allows you to have vehicles with separate components (for example, the wheels of the vehicles and lights). In a near future, collisions between vehicles will be a reality.

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.

Higher resolution imagery coming to Google Earth

digitalglobeLast week DigitalGlobe, one of the primary suppliers of imagery for Google Earth, was given permission to sell higher resolution imagery. Previously they’ve been limited to selling 50 centimeter imagery, but that limitation has been dropped. They’ll now be able to sell their 41 centimeter imagery, and that will drop to 25 centimeter later this year.

While the difference doesn’t sound like much, Mapbox did a great comparison showing how much better 40 centimeter imagery looks when compared to 50 centimeter imagery.

In short:

If going from 50 cm resolution to 40 cm resolution sounds like a small change at first, remember that we’re talking about square pixels. When square A is only ¼ longer on a side than square B, it contains more than 150% as much area. Therefore, a slightly smaller linear size means a lot more clarity.

No word on when exactly we’ll begin to see this new imagery, but it sounds like we’ll see some of it within the next few months.

(via the Verge)

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.