Sports

The Atlanta Braves new stadium in Google Earth

May 15, 2014

A few months ago, the Atlanta Braves baseball team announced they were moving out of downtown Atlanta and into one of the suburbs to the northwest part of the city. The current stadium, Turner Field, was home to the 1996 Olympic Games and has long been one of my favorite 3D structures in Google Earth. While the new version that was auto-generated with 3D Imagery isn’t quite as sharp as the old hand-modeled version, it’s still a great looking model.

The new stadium will be located up I-75 in Cobb County, on a 60-acre plot of land. Here is a look at the new location in Google Earth, which you can see for yourself by loading this KMZ file.

I expect at some point we’ll see a 3D model of the new stadium, but for now all they have are rough renderings of what they’d like to do. The new stadium is expected to open for the 2017 season. You can learn more at homeofthebraves.com.

Mapping your hike with Google Earth

February 27, 2014

A recent article at Popular Mechanics discusses some great ways to share your hikes with your friends via Google Earth, and they include some great tips.

To start of course, they recommend that you carry a handheld GPS unit. You can also use various apps on your cell phone, but because the big battery drain of GPS-related apps, be sure you have enough battery power to make it through the hike. When you finish the hike, upload the resulting file to Google Earth, mark it up with other placemarks and photos, then export the file as a KMZ to share with your friends.

You can also use apps such as Everytrail, which makes great use of Google Earth Tours, to share your adventures.

Lastly, be sure to check out some of the great ways you can use the Google Earth ruler. You can use it before your hike to estimate distances, or afterwards to see how far you went.

What are your favorite tips for using Google Earth to supplement your hiking?

The path of the Olympic torch in Google Earth

February 11, 2014

Our friends at DataAppeal, who recently released a variety of updatesto their excellent tool, are back with some great visualizations of the Olympic torch relay.

The first is the “Ribbon Path”, which you can view on their site here, or by downloading this KML file for use in Google Earth.

They also have an animated version that can be found on their site here or loaded in Google Earth using this KML file.

Improving your golf game with Google Earth

February 5, 2014

We’ve seen Google Earth connected with the game of golf a number of times over the years. We’ve talked about the built-in Golf Courses layer, sites like GolfNation that make great use of Google Earth, and even fly-throughs of ideal play on each hole for some courses.

Tony Korologos at the Hooked on Golf Blog has just written a great post about how he uses Google Earth to prepare for his next round of golf. From his post, here is an example of how he looks at a hole:

From looking at the aerial imagery on Google Earth, this looks to be a tight, tree-lined hole. The hole is only 390 from the middle tees. We don’t need to hit driver here unless we are not long hitters. A tee shot of 240-250 yards will put us in a safe and fat part of the fairway. The strategy for the tee shot is a 3-wood, or a driver if your driver goes about 250 yards. I measured from the tee to the left fairway bunker and that clocks in at 266.6 yards. Once again, that 3-wood is looking good from the tee. Even if we hit it on the line of the bunker, we won’t reach the bunker, unless our 3-wood goes 266 yards.

The approach on hole #1 is fairly simple. There’s a bunker on the right, so we want to aim left, away from the bunker.

It’s a great way to preview a course, and the Google Earth editing tools (adding placemarks, paths, etc) make it easy to add notes and ideas to each hole. Check out Tony’s full post to learn more.

Mapping the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Google Earth

February 4, 2014

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi will be kicking off in a few days, and while I expect Google will release some neat tools to help you follow the games, George at MyReadingMapped has already put out a great post with links and info about some of the venues.

George’s post includes a detailed map of the various venues, and you can grab the KML file from there to view everything inside of Google Earth (including a few 3D models, as seen here).

I’m expecting we’ll see many more Olympic-related Google Earth posts coming this week, but please contact us if we miss any. In the meantime, check out the full blog post on MyReadingMapped and start digging in.