Flying

Track Santa’s journey in Google Earth

December 24, 2010

By the time you read this, Santa will have already begun his journey around the world, starting around 2:00am EST today. His journey will be tracked using a variety of methods including satellites, radar and fighter jets.
You can view the main Santa tracker here, but read on for other ways to follow his journey throughout the day.
If you missed the chance to watch his journey last year, here is a highlight reel that Google has put together:

There are a lot of great ways to follow him on his journey, thanks to the folks at NORAD and some help from Google:
Watch his progress on Google Maps. Visit noradsanta.org to see a map of his location and his next scheduled stop.
• Watch him fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Visit the “Track in Google Earth“

page to watch Santa fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Last year, I fired up this page on my netbook, placed it up on the mantle, and we kept a close eye on Santa all day long.
• Follow his progress on your phone. Search for [santa] in Google Maps for Mobile, or visit m.noradsanta.org from your phone to track his progress while you’re on the go.
• Follow him on other services, such as his YouTube channel, Twitter account and Facebook Page.

As another fun bonus, Google has just added a Santa hat to “Pegman” (the Street View character) in Google Maps. He doesn’t change the functionality of Google Maps at all, but just makes things a bit more festive!
Also, Google has built a variety of custom online holiday cards for you to send to your family and friends. You can see them all at googlemapsholidays.appspot.com. It uses a fun combination of winter images and Google Maps to create a fun card for you to send.

Skydiving in Google Earth

December 14, 2010

Google’s “Demo Slam” has brought out some creative ideas from people. The basic idea is to create a video that uses technology in a unique way. Some are serious, many are funny, and lots of them are worth watching.
This one really caught my attention — a way to sky dive using Google Earth. There’s not much practical application to it, but it looks like they had a ton of fun making it and it’s certainly a creative use of Google Earth.
They used an overhead projector to display Google Earth from a nearby laptop, and even had a friend point a fan toward them to add to the realism. Check it out below!

Have you seen any other Demo Slams that use Google Earth in a unique way? Leave a comment and let us know.
(via @gsightseeing)

Take your own aerial photos with the Swinglet CAM

November 30, 2010

Over the past year, we’ve shown you a few of the amazing places where Frank has taken aerial photos with his kite, like Petite Tabac, BBQ Island and Manihi. The imagery is certainly stunning, as shown here in this image of Petite Tabac:

However, if flying a kite doesn’t sound appealing to you, a company called senseFly has a product that might interest you — the swinglet CAM. It’s a remote controlled plane that somewhat resembles a B-2 Stealth Bomber, with a 12 megapixel camera attached to the bottom to capture images as you fly!

It also has some innovative features, such as the ability to fly a pre-programmed route based on GPS coordinates.
It’s hard to say what your typical image quality would be with a device like this, but the samples shown on their page are quite impressive, such as the image below:

Detailed pricing information isn’t available on their site, but they told me that the complete system is around $10,600 (USD). I certainly agree with gizmag that it’s not cheap. However, if you’re often needing high-quality aerial imagery, this is certainly a great option to consider.
For more, check out the video below to see it in action or check out their official site.

An excellent flight simulator for Google Earth

November 10, 2010

Back in 2006, Frank showed you how you could sort of use Google Earth as a flight simulator. It was crude, but effective. In late 2007, Google put a more realistic flight simulator into Google Earth, but kept it hidden as a secret mode.
More recently, this February we saw a demo of GEVision, which integrates Microsoft Flight Sim technology but uses Google Earth for the terrain and imagery.
Now we have our first look at Xavier Tassin’s Google Earth Flight Simulator, which might be the best one yet!

It uses the Google Earth Plug-in, and you can try it for yourself at gefs-online.com

. If you need help with the controls, here are some instructions.
A few other notes about the project, from Xavier:

I have been playing around with Flight Sims since MS Flight Simulator 1.0 (I was 6 at that time 🙂
6 years ago, I had a first try at making an Online Flight Simulator (www.keynoise.com) as a commercial for an Australian acquaintance of mine who is selling the Evektor Sportstar down under. This Sim was build with Shockwave and got more success than just being a commercial. Sadly, technical limitations and lack of time stopped my progress into making something better.
6 month ago I tried “Ships” from PlanetAction, and realized that the GE plug-in would be a great platform for making my dream come true: make a worldwide scenery Flight Simulator.
The biggest challenge into making GE Flight Simulator was to work around the lack of a 3D physics engine in Javascript: it took me some time but I finally made my own. Also, as Google Earth is not really meant to be a game platform, it is difficult (and requires a lot of maths!) to animate complex objects. But all in all I was really surprised by the performances I could get out of the plug-in.
For the beta version, I tried to integrate as many of the features I though to be important to make it fun. It is not perfect yet but it gives a good idea of what can be achieve with a bit of Javascript and the GE plug-in. I am especially excited about the multi-player mode and I would like to get some feedback from users on that.
For the Future, I am planning to add more planes, improve the flight models, add an airport database and some aeronautical charting, improve the multi-player feature. I also would like (if enough interest is shown) to open an aircraft marketplace to everyone.

All in all, it’s a great flight sim. Try it for yourself, and tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Build your own Liquid Galaxy

October 1, 2010

Late last year, we told you about Google’s “Liquid Galaxy”, a semi-circle of eight 55-inch LCD screens that immerse you in Google Earth. It’s quite an amazing-looking machine.

Yesterday, Google announced that you can now build or buy one of your own!
According to End Point (one of the suppliers; via TechCrunch), the cost to have them install it is roughly $72,000 – $80,000. Of course, you could always build it yourself and save some substantial money.

While I doubt any of us will install anything like this in our homes, it’d be neat to see some businesses incorporate one into their facility. Wouldn’t it be cool to walk into the CNN building and see one of these with their latest news stories geo-referenced on the globe? Or perhaps walk into Coca-Cola headquarters and step into their Liquid Galaxy to see all of their distribution points plotted on the globe? There are a lot of potential uses for it, though the high cost would make it tough to justify the purchase for a lot of companies.
For more information on Liquid Galaxy, check out Google’s “Quick Start” page, or you can watch the video below: