• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth

  • Home
  • About
  • Basics
  • Links
  • Tips
  • 3D Models
  • Sightseeing
  • Videos

Tours

‘The Eye’, a rotating island in Argentina

September 2, 2016

We recently came across this article about a floating island in Argentina that rotates. Producer and film director Sergio Neuspiller discovered it when filming in the area and has since started a Kickstarter to raise funds to investigate it further. See the Kickstarter promotion video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfmYEZ8FVAM

The island is visible in Google Earth imagery and has been in existence since at least 2003, the date of the oldest Google Earth image of the location. Here is an animation showing how it moves over time:

It is fairly obvious what is happening (no, it’s not an alien base as some have suggested). When you have a floating island and a water current that flows along one side of it, it will naturally rotate and become circular over time, as well as carving out a circular hole. The phenomenon is quite rare, because the conditions must be just right. Floating islands of plants are themselves quite rare, but in addition, it requires a current, though a fairly slow moving one.

[ Update: We believe wind may be the main factor in some instances rather than current. ]

There is a special type of floating island that is very common and that is ice. The phenomenon does occur with ice, as you can see in the YouTube videos below:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j6dS9rxbuk

We tried to find other examples of rotating floating islands not made of ice and we found one on a lake in India:

Read more about it here.

We also found a reference to one in the Okavango delta. You can read the full story about it in a PDF found here. Apparently a Brian Wilson discovered a rotating floating island and identified it in aerial imagery from as far back as 1944. It could be seen to have kept rotating up until about 1974, when it attached itself to one side of the lagoon it was in and remained there until at least 1990. We had a look at the coordinates given and not far from that location did indeed find a floating island that has moved between 2006 and 2016. We cannot positively confirm that it is the same island.

But for the real treasure trove of rotating floating islands, the place to go is the Luapula River on the border of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Sadly, there isn’t a lot of historical imagery, so good animations were not possible. So, we are showing them in the form of ‘before and afters’ to demonstrate that the islands do, in fact, move.

before
after

A round one, an oval and another shape, sharing a pool.

before
after
before
after

If we are not mistaken, the dark patches are fire scars, suggesting the island can sustain fires without destroying it.

before
after

A whole bunch of floating islands!

before
after
before
after

And that’s just some of them. There are many more! Amazingly, we could just (although only just) see some of them moving using our Landsat animations KML file.

To see the above locations in Google Earth, including historical imagery tours, download this KML file.

Filed Under: Sightseeing, Tours, Video Tagged With: floating islands

Mountain Visions Google Earth tours

January 20, 2015

Prompted by our series showcasing uses of the Google Earth plugin, Gary Grimm of Mountain Visions has shared with us some Google Earth tours that they have created. You can find a complete gallery of their tours here which includes a mixture of tours to download and view in Google Earth, tours to watch using the Google Earth plugin, and tours that have been recorded and can be viewed as an online video.

Although we generally prefer to download tours and view them in Google Earth, using the plugin to display tours can have a number of advantages:

  • You can place descriptive information in the web page around it, including links to further content – although most of this can be done within the tour.

  • To some degree it protects your content from copying.

  • It is easier for the user as they do not have to download the tour and open Google Earth.

Below are some of the best tours from the Mountain Visions collection presented using the Google Earth plugin. To view them using the plugin, you will need the plugin installed and a compatible browser. It may take some time to load the tours, so be patient and wait for the ‘play’ button to appear in the bottom left hand corner of the plugin.

Tour of Potential CuMO Mine – May 2012
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Prince of Wales Island Watershed Restoration Projects, 2006-2011
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Tour of Mores Creek Watershed Tour, October 2013
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Boise River at High Water June 3, 2011
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

CuMo Mine
A screenshot from the CuMo mine tour.

Filed Under: GE Plugin, Tours Tagged With: Google Earth plugin, Google Earth tour

Flying around with Blue Magpie Tea in Taiwan

September 17, 2014

Over the years we’ve seen some great files come from Steven Ho, such as his panorama from the top of Mount Everest, his tribute to Steve Jobs and his Trip View Bowl visualization. He’s back with another one, which follows the path of a blue magpie as it flies along the Xindieng River, to promote eco-friendly tea farms.

blue magpie tea in google earth

The unique part of this is the way he controls the camera during the flight. Steven says it was quite challenging to control the perspective like a movie scene. If you just keep the bird in the same position on the screen the results are inferior. So he has the camera move around the bird to get different perspectives, with the bird even going off camera for brief periods. Also, to get the bird to appear properly in Google Earth he enlarged it several hundred times, which has the added benefit of making it easier to control the perspective.

You can try it for yourself by loading this KML file, or read the full write-up on his blog.

Great work, Steven!

Filed Under: 3D Models, Flying, Tours Tagged With: blue magpie, steven ho

The Spirit of St. Louis in Google Earth

December 16, 2013

Colin Hazlehurst has contributed some excellent tours to Google Earth over the years.  His most impressive is likely the recreation of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand, but he’s also covered items such as the 1825 Greek Independence battle.

He recently came across a great model of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane in the 3D Warehouse, read up more about him on Wikipedia, and then decided to recreate the famous flight in Google Earth.

spirit-of-st-louis

The result is a very impressive tour, part of which can be seen in this video:

His plan is to present the 33.5 hour journey in about 335 minutes of animation, in other words, flying the model at 600 knots instead of the 100 knots at which the Spirit of St. Louis travelled.

He’s created this KMZ file, generated using a variant of the TourMaker tool that he’s developed for this kind of Google Earth animation. It still has some way to go, but is quite impressive already.

Great work, Colin!

Filed Under: 3D Models, Flying, Sightseeing, Tours, Video Tagged With: charles lindbergh, colin hazelhurst, spirit of st louis

Making high-quality movies with Google Earth

July 30, 2013

We’ve mentioned Planet In Action‘s Paul van Dinther on GEB quite a few times in the past.  From his games like “Ships” and “Drive the A-Team Van” to his amazing projects like the A-tour, he always has something great in the works.

If you follow him on Google+, you may have seen his recent posts about creating super high-resolution videos using Google Earth imagery.  Here’s how he did it, in his words:

—–

Google Earth, for me by far the coolest software around because it brings the world data along with a pretty decent rendering engine. Lately I am involved in several exhibit designs where Google Earth features. Although initial plans were to use interactive Google Earth applications, I now focus on the use of Google Earth based video. There are several reasons for that.

  • Computers fail. If one computer fails once a year, then chances are that with 20 computers the risk of failure is 20 times larger.
  • Software maintenance. Think about Windows updates, Google Earth updates etc etc.
  • Software stability. Although Google Earth is pretty good for private use, it is not stable enough to be used unsupervised in a public space.
  • Broadband availability. If the internet is slow or unavailable the exhibit is dead.
  • Longlevity. Permanent public exhibits also need to run longer then the Google Earth deprecation term of two years. In other words. When Google decides to turn off the Google Earth servers, all interactive exhibits die. Not good.
  • Solid performance. Public exhibits must be robust, run reliably and must be easy to turn on and off without needing an IT guy for trouble shooting

But, there are also softer issues with interactivity. Everyone will want to travel to their house of course which is interesting only to you while the erratic motions are severely nauseating to everyone else. Exhibits typically tell a story. Camera angles, camera motion and location are carefully scripted to support the story. Allowing visitors to drive the view would be akin to letting you steer the camera during Spiderman 17 at your local cinema.

Video doesn’t have any of the above issues. However, the question is, how do you generate the perfect video from Google Earth data. The free version of Google Earth doesn’t do video recording however Google Earth Pro has a feature called Moviemaker which allows you to turn a kml tour into a video file. Although Moviemaker finally reached a quality level that it has become useful, it is still wrought with many issues. So I decided to re-invent the whole video making process.

First a warning for anyone contemplating the use of Google Earth video for uses other then private. The Google Earth license agreement does not allow you to use the video footage for uses other then private. There are also strict attribution guidelines from Google and for public use special permission must be obtained from Google. For TV and film a broadcast license needs to be applied for. You can put your video on Youtube but you may not monetize it.

Back to issues with Google Earth Pro Moviemaker. I used that software extensively over the years and during that time pointed out many issues some that have since been fixed. In fact right now Moviemaker actually looks pretty decent. But there are two major issues with it. First of all, Moviemaker has limited options in terms of video frame size and orientation. It assumes always landscape and the maximum size is 1080p.

image1

Secondly, I am on a quest to create the perfect smooth ultra high resolution (20 thousand pixels wide) Google Earth ride. Unfortunately, despite all the care taken for the kml tour, some slight hesitation artifacts can still be observed in the video footage. I suspect this is due to Moviemaker applying its own path smoothing. Besides, Google Earth Pro pricey for private users with an annual license fee of $399 USD

So, I am going to take you on a tech journey to see how perfect video can be done. Let’s first step back a bit and look at the free version of Google Earth 7. Sorry Apple users, most of the tools used only exist on windows but maybe you can find replacements for OSX. It is very easy to create a placemark with associated view and take an image snapshot at the same resolution as shown on your screen using CTRL + ALT + C.

image2

This feature copies the Google Earth image and keeps it in your windows clipboard. From here you could simply open a bitmap editor like MSPaint or the excellent Paint dot net and paste the snapshot in order to save it as a bitmap. It be a long painful process to do this for a 60 fps video as you need 60 images for every second of video. But there are macro tools that come to the rescue. A macro is a program that allows you to define actions you normally perform with keyboard and mouse in a script which is perfect for actions that are repeated over and over. I tried several tools but AutoIt script proved to be very powerful. Not only is it able to automate user actions. It turns out it is also capable to directly store the clipboard image to a file without the need to use a bitmap editor. But, now you need to start doing some programming.

image3

Not only can we store the bitmap directly to file but we can also number each image file sequentially. This will be important later on. Now we can automatically capture image frames from Google Earth and store them to a sequentially numbered image file but how do we advance our camera in Google Earth? Mickey already wrote about Tourmaker before which is a browser based tool to create mathematically perfect camera animations. It would be a small job to make it output a kml file with numbered placemarks for each frame. I could load these in Google Earth and get get the Autoit macro advance the selected placemark before each frame is captured. A bit like this:

image4

But it all seems a bit painful and it requires the sidebar to be toggled in and out of view as it takes up valuable screen space. But there is another way to control the view in Google Earth. Liquid Galaxy This feature allows me to remote control Google Earth views via the network using UDP messages. By all means check it out. You can play with Liquid galaxy if you have two computers each with Google Earth on it. But guess what! Any program can control Google Earth using a network provided it talks the right language. Liquid Galaxy uses UDP message strings  I wondered if the powerful Autoit script was able to send UDP data and…. YESSSS

image5

Don’t worry about the scary programming. It is just here as “proof” . So here we are, I am now able to animate the camera in Google Earth and produce numbered image files for each frame all automatically. However, there is a problem. Google Earth streams data in as you advance through the landscape and we have no way to see when Google Earth has completed loading all the data. In an ideal world I would love to be able to read when the loading is complete.

image6

Load progress can only be obtained in the Google Earth plugin which we can’t use for other reasons. So we are limited to simply wait for a bit before we capture each snapshot. In my Autoit script I wait 3 seconds for each frame. But because I rendered the same sequence several times this data is all in the Google Earth cache. The Google Earth cache is an invisible data storage where Google Earth keeps the last 2 gigabyte locally stored on your hard-drive. Frank Taylor uses this feature extensively on his travels when he needs Google Earth data but has no internet. So far the 2 gigabyte cache has not been an issue but if it becomes an issue there is the possibility to create a much bigger local storage using a proxy server called squid.

Since autoit script is doing so much of the heavy work I might as well push it some more. I expanded my Autoit script to automatically launch Google Earth and set it to the exact size I wanted. Since the Google Earth snapshot feature (CTRL + ALT + C) captures an image at the size it is displayed on the screen it stands to reason that the image size can be adjusted by adjusting the Google Earth Window. Now you are dependent to the size of your monitor or more correctly, the size of your desktop. On my system I run 3 1080p monitors that together form my desktop.

image7

I can re-arrange my displays in Windows. Line them up vertically or horizontally in either landscape or portrait. The Autoit script can easily adjust the Google Earth window size to exactly where you want it. While in portrait orientation take care of your neck. Mine still hurts.

image8

In the above example I moved the top of the Google Earth window to -1920 and made the window 1080 pixels wide and 5760 pixels tall. This doesn’t mean your images come out at that size because we lose the window border and menu areas. Make sure to turn off as much as you can. Here is an image frame captured in that configuration.

image9

So, now we are in control of our image frame size but all we have now is a bunch of image frames. We have yet to turn this into a video. I use Adobe CS6 creative suite which is excellent value on subscription basis but there is also a free solution. FFmpeg is a powerful free command-line video compiler that can compile your sequentially numbered images into video. There is a bit of a learning curve here as the command-line parameters depend on what video output you desire.

But once the video has been compiled you get something like this, this or this Sadly Youtube really kills the ultra smooth effect obtained from 60 fps playback and re-compression make it much less detailed then it really is. Download a high quality video here (11MB). I thought it be fun to share some of the video journey I have been on. Maybe it will entice some of you to experiment and discover new ideas. At some stage I might release a limited version of Tourmaker and a GEMovie program that will work together with Tourmaker so that you don’t need to know any of the above stuff. You can simply focus on video making. But till then you are left to experiment and figure it out yourself based on the above. Have fun.

Filed Under: Sightseeing, Tours, Video Tagged With: paul van dinther

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 24
  • Go to Next Page »


Primary Sidebar

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
Twitter




Categories

  • 3D Models (792)
  • Applications (708)
  • Business (288)
  • Environment (353)
  • Flying (208)
  • GE Plugin (282)
  • Google Earth News (1,764)
  • Google Earth Tips (592)
  • GPS (136)
  • Navigation (227)
  • Network Links (214)
  • Sailing (121)
  • Science (499)
  • Sightseeing (1,903)
  • Site News (587)
  • Sky (67)
  • Sports (154)
  • Street View (50)
  • Tours (117)
  • Video (421)
  • Weather (180)

Get new posts by email

Get new posts by email:

Google Earth Satellites

Copyright 2005-© 2023 Frank Taylor. All Rights Reserved.

This blog and its author are not an official source of information from Google that produces and owns Google Earth Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc.. All image screenshots from Google Earth are Copyright Google. All other trademarks appearing here are the trademarks of their respective owners.