Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Business

Exploring New South Wales, Australia in Google Earth

The New South Wales (Australia) Government has just released a new product they’re calling the NSW Globe which compiles a ton of information about the state into a single, powerful KML file. The goal of the site, according to NSW minister for finance and services Andrew Constance:

The tool allows users to find out more about their property or local area, and provides access to historical information including aerial photographs of Sydney from the 1940s, as well as flood maps from places like Bourke, Moree and Wagga

Inside the KML file you’ll find the following:

  • Imagery (medium and high resolution aerial, satellite both government and private sourced)
  • Additional imagery (1943 Sydney Historic, Emergency Services)
  • Terrain data (25m DTMS, 5m DTMS, LiDAR and SRTM various locations)
  • Places (e.g. population centre, suburb, other places)
  • Boundaries (e.g. coastline, local government, localities, electoral state and federal)
  • Roads (e.g. arterial road, minor road, other)
  • Rail (e.g. railway line, railway station)
  • Addresses (property and address)
  • Land parcel (e.g. lot and deposited plan, property boundary, labels)

For example, here is a shot of Sydney using the 1943 imagery:

sydney 1943

It’s quite an impressive product and it provides an amazing amount of information about New South Wales. Check it out for yourself at globe.six.nsw.gov.au.

(via TechWorld)

Visualizing redevelopment using Google Earth

The city of Charlottesville, Virginia has plans for a major redevelopment of 330 acres.  While the plans are still in progress, Brian Wheeler took advantages of Google Earth to add some great context to his recent story about the plans.  He simply took the proposed plans and created an image overlay of them in Google Earth, as seen here:

charlottesville

You can download a copy of his KMZ file here to see it for yourself.  As for his reasons why he chose to use Google Earth to help show the plans?

Whenever I see someone looking at the Strategic Investment Area map when it’s projected, they ask where exactly that is in Charlottesville. Google Earth to the rescue! Even works great on my tablet using the Google Earth app.

Be sure to check out his full article on the Charlottesville Tomorrow site to learn more.  Great work, Brian!

(via +Brian Wheeler)

Using Google Earth to find locations for TV shows

location-managerThe Independent recently posted an article that explores the difficult yet essential job that TV show “location managers” have. Finding the perfect spot for a particular scene can be a major challenge.

The position requires many different tools, including Google Earth.  From the article:

Another useful tool of the trade is Google Earth, says Breaking Bad’s [Alex] Gianopoulos. “If I’m looking for swimming pools or parking-lots, then Google Earth is priceless,” he says. “But when I need something like an ‘Exterior two-story house, with little to no bushes in front, near the Vamanos Pest [the fumigation company in Breaking Bad]’ location, the best way to do it is to walk up and down every street in the vicinity.”

“Google Earth?” muses [Nick] Marshall. “Funnily enough, it’s actually very useful if you’re looking for parking.”

The swimming pool part of that brings back memories; back in 2007 Frank posted about a pool cleaning service that used Google Earth to find potential customers.

Google Earth certainly has a lot of uses, and this is a great example of one that most people don’t think about.  Check out the full article for yourself over on The Independent website.

Excellent property and data visualizations in Google Earth

Google Earth is an amazing tool to visualize trends and growth when it comes to real estate.  In the past we’ve shown you some tools that use historical imagery to show how things have changed, such as Google’s Timelapse project and this impressive visualization of urban growth in Spain.

Today we wanted to show you three impressive videos that use Google Earth to show historical real estate information in a very compelling way.  They take three major american cities (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) and show the growth of them over the past 150 years.  The videos begin with a flat city, then slowly begin dropping in colored polygons for the buildings in the order in which they were built.

It’s an impressive set of videos and a very effective way to show this kind of growth.

You can read more about these on The Source website.

Places affected by the US Government Shutdown

Last week we showed you some ways to view U.S. National Parks on Google Earth during the U.S. Government shutdown.  With the government still not back in order yet, this map of “Places affected by the 2013 U.S. Government Shutdown” from MyReadingMapped is quite handy.

shutdown

It’s a very comprehensive map, showing hundreds of locations that are directly affected by the shutdown.

In the words of George, creator of the map:

On one hand this map shows you just how large the government has grown. On the other hand, it shows just how much of government regulates and/or services the needs of business. Thus, you can see how much influence big business has in intervening in government, to get government to intervene in business, to the advantage of the politically influential business over its competition, consumers, taxpayers, employees and small business. Thus, your job and income are entwined in how big government has grown either because your employer intervened in government on your behalf, or because it services a government program, or because your employer sells product and services to the government, or because your customer works for or sells product and services to the government. Or, because your employer receives a government subsidy, bailout or tax break. We have the world’s largest economy in part due to the fact that we have the world’s largest government.

You can view the map on their site, directly on Google Maps, or in Google Earth by loading this KML file.

Great work, George!