Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Business

Waffle House locations visualized on Google Earth

Here’s an interesting use of Google Earth, that could apply to virtually any business with a variety of locations. Nik Freeman wanted to find a way to display the density of Waffle House restaurant locations across the United States, so he put together a visual display of them. He had intended to simply use it as a way to play with 3D in Google Earth, but the big spike in Atlanta was interesting enough that he wanted to share the image.

waffle house density

Some of Nik’s notes on the “quads” that display the data:

  • The quads are continuous across the entire USA. There are no gaps, so every Waffle House location falls within one quad.
  • Quad boundaries are static. They will not have changed if I update the data.
  • Quads are named for the area they cover, making it easy to discuss particular locations.
  • At approximately 2392 square miles each, quads are a nice “bucket” size for tabulating this kind of location data meaningfully.

It’s a great way to show this kind of data. You can read more over on his “Maps by Nik blog“.

( via Huffington Post)

Connecting WordPress with GIS

logoI’ll be speaking today (with Ali Green, my partner at GreenMellen) at the monthly Georgia URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) meeting here in Atlanta at lunchtime today. We’ll be discussing how to use WordPress with GIS, which is a great topic since this blog (as well as Frank’s Tahina Expedition are powered by WordPress.

Slides from the presentation can be found on the GreenMellen blog.

Do you use WordPress? What kind of fun GIS plugins do you use?

Expanding the capabilities of the Liquid Galaxy

We’ve talked about Google’s Liquid Galaxy project a number of times over the years, starting back in 2009 and showing neat things such as Paul van Dinther’s excellent A-tour along the way.

The End Point Corporation has been doing some great things with Liquid Galaxy recently, so we’ve asked their Business Technology Analyst Bianca Rodrigues to fill us in on what they’ve been doing.  Her thoughts are below:

As readers here well know, the Google Earth platform provides an unparalleled exploration platform for our globe (and the Moon and Mars). At End Point, we are continuing to push this exploration platform further with the Liquid Galaxy: an interactive, panoramic system, which combines wrap-around screens and computers to create an immersive experience for the user controlled from a single SpaceNav controller, touchscreen, or Leap Motion

The Liquid Galaxy is an open source project founded by Google and further developed by End Point. It started out as a Google Earth viewer, but has evolved to become an ideal data visualization tool for operations, marketing, and research. It brings rich satellite imagery, oceanic data, and points of interest from all over the globe.

Liquid Galaxy for different industries
There are many applications, including real estate, GIS, events/hospitality, educational institutions and museums and aquariums.

With GIS, for example, End Point can take almost any data set that contains GIS coordinates and superimpose the data within Google Earth. The data visualizations—bar graphs, area heat maps, connecting lines—can then be navigated with a full spatial experience in a simulated 3D space.

Loading GIS data into Google Earth on the Liquid Galaxy as KML (one of Google Earth’s mark-up languages) helps users interact and visualize their data in a totally new way.

If you already have data in KML then it’s a no-brainer to use the Liquid Galaxy as a powerful tool to exhibit the data and to entrance audiences. If you don’t have your GIS data in KML format yet, End Point has a GIS-to-KML conversion service which can transform data to create an effective presentation in Google Earth.

This immersive multi-screen technology helps to promote a collaborative research environment. The Liquid Galaxy is perfect for an office operations center, data analysis center, civic planning, extractive industries, or equally great for an eye-catching corporate presentation at a trade show.

More Features: Interactive Spaces
Interactive Spaces is an Open Source project being developed at Google (originally in collaboration with The Rockwell Group’s Lab) for doing what it says: making physical spaces interactive. Interactive Spaces is a well-structured framework for connecting hardware peripherals (such as motion sensors, input devices, and monitor screens) with software applications (such as Google Earth, web browsers, and 3D games) to form a coherent interactive experience in a physical space.

With such a workable and robust platform available, Interactive Spaces is a natural fit for controlling the input and output events for the Liquid Galaxy. At its core the Liquid Galaxy is a multi-computer, multi-screen data interactivity platform, taking input from a touchscreen, 3D Space Navigator, or even a treadmill, and displaying different kinds of data on multiple screens: Google Earth, panoramic photos, panoramic videos, as well as non-panoramic imagery and data.

To date, End Point has been working in development and test mode on Interactive Spaces-powered Liquid Galaxies. In addition to the systems we have set up in our offices, we have set it up for testing at a couple of Google labs that have an interest in Interactive Spaces. The most visible change to the system is an overhaul of the touchscreen interface to blend the experience of Google Earth Locations and scenic Google Street View locations such as museum interiors and coral reefs.

end-point

The integration of Google Earth and Google Street View into a unified experience is one of the most exciting developments from adopting Interactive Spaces. The two applications fade into each other seamlessly, all orchestrated by an AngularJS webapp. Because every activity in the system communicates with the others, it was easy to have a map on the touchscreen follow the position of the Earth camera without the complexity of instructing different systems written in different languages to talk to each other.

Where we are taking it
We are embracing the possibilities of Interactive Spaces. As a scriptable event manager, with multiple input streams, programmable interactions, and married with the multi-screen-multi-device platform of the Liquid Galaxy, we’re excited about the new possibilities. We welcome input and conversations with other Open Source developers, shops, and end-client agencies to tax our brains on what we can make this great platform do. Got an idea? Ping End Point.

Virtual Cilicia on Google Earth

We’ve seen a handful of “virtual” cities and countries over the years, such as Virtual Alabama and Virtual Kenya. The platforms give users access to a wide array of information about the area and can be quite useful.

Recently at an archaeological seminar held at the University of Bern, the Virtual Cilicia Project was launched to help gain insight into this historic area.

virtual cilicia

As with similar programs we’ve seen in the past, this gives great insight into the history and provides access to field research projects from the university.

To get started, simply download this KML file and open it in Google Earth. Use the various checkboxes on the left side of your screen to enable and disable various features as you browse around.

For more, check out the full post about the project here. Note that the page is in German, but your browser can likely translate it fairly well.

How to fix errors in Google Earth

We continue to receive many emails each week asking how to correct map errors in Google Earth (address in the wrong location, point of interest is missing, etc), so I thought it’d be worth revisiting that.

To start, you don’t actually fix the errors in Google Earth; you fix them in Google Maps, and those corrections are synced into Google Earth over the course of a few weeks.  The process has changed slightly in the new Google Maps, so here’s how it works.

To suggest a correction, click on the small question mark in the lower right corner of the screen inside of Google Maps and choose “Report a data problem”.

report-a-problem

Next, click on the map to show Google the exact location with the problem.

After that, the window in the upper left corner of Google Maps will ask for details, based on the type of object you just clicked. For example, if you clicked on a road Google will ask you questions related to roads (“doesn’t exist”, “one-way/two-way is incorrect”, etc).  If you click on a business, it will ask you questions related to the business.

I’ve suggested quite a few edits to my local area, and all have been accepted into Google Earth/Maps and helped make my town more accurate. I’ve updated street names, new roads, closed restaurants, etc.  I’m a heavy user of the GPS navigation features on Google Maps for my Android phone, so having an accurate map is very important.

The “report a problem” feature is a great tool to help make Google products more accurate for everyone. To learn more about how this process works, you can visit this page in the Google Maps support system.