Sports

Cycling the Alps releases Android App

January 8, 2013

A little more than two years ago we introduced you to the excellent Cycling the Alps website. They feature hundreds of Google Earth tours of various cycing routes in the Alps, and they’ve added many new features since then.
After reading our article about how great Google Earth looks on the Nexus 10, they decided to create an Android app for it. They built it using the Android Maps v2 API and the result is quite impressive!

The app is free and can be found here in the Google Play store. It’s compatible with most Android devices, so head out there and give it a shot.

GPS + Video + Google Earth = Pretty awesome

November 30, 2012

GPS4Sport has just released a new product that combines GPS track data with action cam movies, then overlays the movie on top of the Google Earth plug-in while it all runs. It sounds complicated, and I’m sure it is on the back end, but the result for the end user is really quite cool.

You can watch a great example of one here.

It also supports flight activities, such as this one,

shown here:

The flight mode supports video as well, though they don’t have any examples of that yet. Check it all out for yourself at GPS4Sport.com.

DailyMotoRide adds Google Earth Plug-in support

August 2, 2012

DailyMotoRide.com has been posting “the world’s best motorcycle roads” for over a year now, making great use of various Google tools including Google Maps and Street View. Combined with the elevation profile at the bottom of the screen, it gives you a good idea of what the ride is like.

Now they’ve added a 3D Fly-Through of the routes by using the Google Earth Plug-in. While the rides don’t look as nice as they do in Street View, the ability to fly through the course is quite awesome and adds another great perspective to each ride.

This is a great example of a project that can be greatly enhanced with the Google Earth Plugin, and it’s one that is certain to get a lot better once the new 3D Imagery arrives on desktops and in the API. The possibilities for what projects like this might be able to do with the 3D Imagery are quite exciting. We still haven’t heard a specific timeframe for it, but Google has said it’ll be released before the end of the year.

Explore the 2012 London Olympics in Google Earth

July 27, 2012

As I’m sure you know, the 2012 London Olympics kick off today, and there are a lot of great ways to use Google Earth to explore the city of London and the various Olympic venues around town.
New Imagery
Google has pushed out fresh 3D imagery for much of London, including the Olympic Park area. It’s not the sharpest imagery we’ve ever seen, but it’s less than two months old and clearly shows all of the Olympic venues.

3D Buildings
Virtually all of the venues are in 3D in Google Earth — they’re not generated via the new “3D Terrain” (which would have been awfully cool), but they’re the older high-quality 3D models. They look great!

Street View
While we don’t have any cool indoor trike-generated Street View imagery, Google has updated most of the Olympic Park area with very new, very sharp imagery. If you’re not familiar with how to use Street View inside of Google Earth, here are some tips to get you started.

Google’s “Explore London” page
Google has built a great page to help you explore London and the various Olympic venues, including some great view fly-throughs, such as this one of the Marathon course.

DataAppeal
We’ve talked about DataAppeal a few times in the past (like when they made some nice updates back in April) and they’ve created some visualizations of Olympic-related material. For example, here is the movement of the Olympic torch on its way to London:

DataAppeal has just produced a new video to show off some of the other things they can do, which you can view here.
Go Explore!
To see all of this great Olympic coverage in Google Earth, head over there with this KML file

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

and check it out for yourself!

My Tracks 2.0, now with mobile Google Earth support

July 16, 2012

“My Tracks” is an Android application that doesn’t tend to get a lot of press. The initial version is more than three years old, and there are a bunch of other apps that do roughly the same thing. Now Google has released My Tracks 2.0, and it comes with a bunch of nice upgrades.

The list of improvements includes:
• The ability to play back your tour directly on Google Earth for Android
• Aggregation of statistics over time to show trends in your performance
• Simpler, faster user interface
• Improved charts and stats tables that are easier to read
For now, the app remains available only on Android. We’re not sure if this is a limitation on iOS, a strategic move, or simply a lack of manpower to build the application for other operating systems. In any case, it’s a great Android app and a nice one to keep around.
There are a lot of fun uses of it. For example, here is a track I did a few years ago when we went on a trolley tour of Savannah, GA:

You can download it for free on Google Play.