Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Sports

Exploring MetLife Stadium, home of the Super Bowl, in Google Earth

With the Super Bowl coming up in a few days, Google has created a variety of tours of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.  Because that area doesn’t yet have “3D Imagery”, the model of the stadium is still the “old” style and is remarkably sharp and includes 3D goalposts and many 3D objects (such as trees) around the stadium.

metlife

While you can certainly fly there and check it out for yourself (searching Google Earth for “MetLife Stadium” should take you there), Google has created a handful of Google Earth tours to help show it off.  The files are fairly simple, but do a nice job of showing off the stadium.

To make the files easy to grab, they’ve uploaded them to a special Google Drive folder.  Inside you’ll find four tours, each available as either a KML file (for use in Google Earth) or an MOV file to watch directly in your browser.

For other (American) football resources, check out Google’s list of all 245 college football stadiums, a great look at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, or a simple game of football that you can play inside of Google Earth.

(via +Google for Media)

Snowboarding in Google Earth

A while back we showed you the excellent Formula 1 racing game that was created by “MisterFoley”, and just in time for the Winter Olympics he’s back now with a fun snowboarding game for Google Earth.

snowboarding

The game has a similar feel to the Formula 1 racing, but is quite well done.  You need to navigate various 3D “gates” down the course, and there are some nice touches such as 3D chair lifts and a nice starting gate shown here:

starting-gate

You can try it for yourself at mister-foley.com/snow and try to get one of the top times on the course!

Nice new enhancements to the Formula One Google Earth game

Earlier this year we showed an excellent Formula 1 racing game for Google Earth that was created by “MisterFoley”. With the 2013 Formula 1 Grand Prix heading to Austin, Texas this weekend, they’ve updated the game with some great new features:

  1. You can select different cars
  2. You can switch between 3rd Person and Bird View Camera during race
  3. You can reset the game and start at start position if you drove wrong and want to start again.
  4. To the additional ranking of each track, i have now a overall ranking.

Here are some images of the new features:

It was already a very impressive game, and these tweaks make it even better.  Go try it for yourself over at www.mister-foley.com/race/.

New premium features for Rally Navigator

Earlier this year we told you about Rally Navigator, a great program that helps rally riders create “ridebooks” to assist them in their events.

rally-navigator

They’ve recently released a premium version with quite a few new features:

  • Print Roadbooks with Complete Tulips and Navigation Icons
  • Show and Hide CAP Headings and GPS Coordinates for each Waypoint
  • Create Rally Route From Imported GPX tracks
  • Utilization of Google Earth Roads & Routing Function – Snap Track to Road
  • Support for Continuous Roll Print Output
  • Import Captured GPX Tracks Over Existing Routes to Correct Route After Pre-run
  • Export GPX Tracks of Routes to GPS Units for Pre-Running

The free version is still very powerful, but for avid fans you can now take it even further.  Learn more at RallyNavigator.com or by watching the short video below:

Share your GPS tracks with Track Profiler

If you enjoy working with GPS tracks from various events, Trackprofiler.com might be of great value to you.  I ran the Peachtree Road Race 10K last week, and putting my track into Trackprofiler was quite helpful.

I recorded the track on my MotoACTV watch, which showed a total distance of 5.85 miles.  A 10K is 6.2, and if any 10K race would be precisely accurate I’d expect the Peachtree certainly would be due to it’s size, popularity and history.

Interestingly enough, when I imported that track into Trackprofiler, it showed the total distance as 10.1km — almost perfect!  This made me more curious about why MotoACTV was showing such an odd number, but pleased that the raw data was apparently fairly solid.

peachtree-trackprofiler

Part of the reason is likely because of the work that Trackprofiler can do to clean up your data.  Along with simply importing it properly and showing the correct distance, it offers a number of handy tools:

  • Join multiple tracks into one
  • Split and remove parts of GPS tracks
  • Edit tracks point by point
  • Create tracks from scratch and save them as GPS routes
  • Add elevation data if your GPS track is missing it
  • Add/edit waypoints to your track
  • Detect and remove GPS measurement errors
  • Detect and remove elevation errors
  • Add and geocode images taken while recording your track
  • Move entire track
  • Convert tracks from KML, OziExplorer, Garmin, and other formats.
  • Organize your collection of GPS tracks

For more, you can play with my data from the Peachtree, or simply go to Trackprofiler.com to try it for yourself.