Tours

View the 2010 Hurricane Season in Google Earth

December 10, 2010

Greg at Geodesic contacted us to let us know about a very cool animation that his company has built which provides a great visualization of the 2010 Hurricane Season. Based on the NOAA tropical cyclone track data, this file does a great job of showing all of the hurricanes in 2010.

The file is rather large (9.35MB), but includes fantastic imagery of the various stages of each storm. For example, here is a great image of Hurricane Danielle as it was heading toward Bermuda:

You can read more about this project on their site. To see it for yourself, you can use this KMZ file

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

or watch the video below:

Street View imagery released in Romania

December 8, 2010

Google has just released Street View imagery in Romania, the first new release since Google Earth 6 came out last week.

As you know, Google Earth 6 completely changed the way that Street View imagery is handled. If you’re not familiar with the changes, this video will show you how it works:

In addition, as pointed out by Google Earth Design, you can now include Street View when creating a tour in Google Earth! Rich even built a sample KML

to show it in action.
It works just as you’d expect:
1. record a tour in the normal way,
2. drag and drop the pegman (orange man icon on the main screen controls) half way through to enter streetview
3. navigate around in streetview
4. click ‘Exit Street View’ button top left of your screen to exit street view
5. stop the tour.
He also includes a bit about the technical aspects of the KML that is generated:

GEarth 6 has spawned a new gx KML element: “gx:ViewerOptions”, this element inserted into a FlyTo parent with”gx:option name=”streetview”” tells GEarth to changes from normal to Streeview in the middle of a tour. ViewerOptions also allows historical imagery and sunlight conditions to be captured as well.

This certainly opens up a lot of possibilities for great new tours using Google Earth. Check out Rich’s full article for more information, and let us know if you create any noteworthy tours using this new feature.

3D Travel launches 3DLasVegas.com

December 7, 2010

A few months ago, we showed you the click 3DHawaii.com site, which is a wonderful resource if you’re planning a trip to the islands.
This morning, they’ve released 3DLasVegas.com and it’s a big improvement over the already-great 3DHawaii. The navigation is much more intuitive, and the entire site has a great flow to it.

In particular, the little “Location Navigator” bar at the bottom is vastly improved. It takes up less space, has more options, and is much easier to use. Here is a close-up of the bar when viewing the MGM Grand.

Some of the items on there:
• View Site: View a pop-up window with information about this location, including address, phone, photos, and a description.
• 3D Views: A very easy way to swoop and fly around the building to see it from all sides.
• 3D Tour: Essentially an automated click-through of the options in the “3D Views”.
• Videos and Photos: What you’d expect.
• Street View: Jump down to check it out in Google Street View.
I’ve yet to visit Las Vegas personally, but I’d like to get there someday with my wife. A site like this would be an excellent tool to help plan our trip. Congrats to the 3DTravel team for a job well done.
Go visit the site

to try it for yourself, check out the video below, or read more about it in their press release at the end of this post.

Following the launch of 3DHawaii.com earlier this year, 3D Travel, Inc. introduces www.3DLasVegas.com, the newest addition to the first-ever collection of interactive 3d travel portals. Available collectively at 3DTravel.com, the sites incorporate Google Earth™ technology and are an innovative, experiential way to plan and book travel on the web.

Travelers who visit 3DLasVegas.com can explore the most comprehensive selection of hotels, resorts, casinos, restaurants, shopping centers, shows and visitor attractions available on the web, most in 3d, to help them plan their vacation or business trip to Las Vegas. After researching all the options, travelers can make reservations directly with featured properties.

“With the early success of 3DHawaii.com, which launched in July, Las Vegas was a natural choice for our second site,” said Craig Carapelho, CEO of 3D Travel, Inc. “Las Vegas attracts a huge number of business and vacation travelers every year. 3DLasVegas.com offers an entirely new, immersive way of seeing what the city has to offer, allowing visitors to best design their Las Vegas experience. Plus, the city’s creative architecture and the vibrant skyline of the Strip look incredible in 3d.”

With the launch of 3DLasVegas.com comes upgraded technology. The new platform has multiple language capabilities, the user interface has been streamlined for easier navigation, street-view accuracy has been improved, and the overall speed of the site has been optimized. Other planned new features include an itinerary builder and a shopping cart, allowing travelers to save preferred hotels and activities while exploring the site.

MGM Resorts International is a client with ten major Las Vegas Strip resorts it operates, including world-famous resorts such as Bellagio, MGM Grand Las Vegas and The Mirage, presented as in-depth 3dLasVegas.com experiences.

For 3D Travel, Inc., 3DLasVegas.com is the second of a planned 10 new destination portals to be rolled out in 18 months. The upcoming sites will highlight domestic and international destinations.

Experience 3D Las Vegas
Travelers who want to plan their next vacation or business trip can utilize 3D Las Vegas in three easy steps: 1. Visit 3DLasVegas.com; 2. Install the Google Earth plug in; 3. Launch the site.

Participate in 3D Las Vegas
Companies interested in being listed on 3D Las Vegas have several options for inclusion. 3D Travel, Inc. works with businesses of all types, from small retail stores to five-star luxury resorts. 3D Travel, Inc. also offers businesses a free 30-day trial listing package that allows them to monitor results and determine if they want to upgrade to an expanded paid listing.

About 3D Travel, Inc.
3D Travel, Inc. specializes in the development of 3d interactive destination portals where people can explore, discover and book travel in content-rich, 3d, virtual environments. Through an exclusive web publishing agreement with one of the largest contributors of 3d buildings on Google Earth™, 3D Travel, Inc. has published hundreds of high-quality 3d buildings in key US travel markets to create virtual online destinations. These 3d models appear on Google Earth™, as well as on 3D Travel Inc.’s stand alone web portals via the Google Earth™ API Plug-In, providing the opportunity for participants to be cost-effectively marketed to the world. This next generation online travel planning experience signals the virtual evolution of web business interactions. For more information, visit www.3dtravel.com.

Animated 3D models in Google Earth

November 23, 2010

A few readers have submitted links to us that show off animated 3D models in Google Earth. We have shown you some of them in the past (Tenerife Airport disaster, Disney Monorail), but the entire collection is bound to have something new for you.
Of particular note is the Roman villa at the Weilberg (KML). As the author states:

This is an interactive reconstruction of the Roman villa at the Weilberg. Take a deep breath and jump back in time. Back to the 2nd Century AD, when the Roman Empire covered most of Europe: The Pax Romana guaranteed peace and prosperity in the new provinces. Here, on the edge of the empire, wealthy Romans settled down. The estate with its impressive 150 m long facade is particularly known for its wine press. View the model in Google Earth, and choose your language in the upper right corner of the balloon texts.

You can view the entire collection of models in the 3D Warehouse, or browse them directly in Google Earth using this KML file

.
What other cool animated models or tours have you found lately?

US Navy Fleet Week in Google Earth

November 11, 2010

Back in October, Chris Yonge of Studio Cruz and Christiaan Adams created a very cool Google Earth Tour for the San Francisco Fleet Week. The tour includes a voice overlay, images, video and more, all in one nice package.
To view the tour, you can download this KMZ file or simply watch the YouTube video below:

Because of the complexity of the tour, Chris and Chritiaan wrote up the following information on how they came up with the idea for the Tour, as well as how they were able to put it together technically. Hopefully this information is helpful if you plan to build a similar Tour for a project of your own.

This project emerged from a desire to help Fleet Week 2010 showcase its mission using a 3D animated tour in Google Earth. Studio Cruz was recommended by the Google Earth team, and was chosen as the developer, after having produced other successful Google Earth tours, including one for Potter Drilling of Redwood City, CA in 2009, which was showcased at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Studio Cruz worked with the Fleet Week organizers to create the seven minute tour in advance of the Navy and Marines’ Fleet Week celebration in early October 2010. The timescale was tight – only five weeks – but since no complex coding was involved it was judged possible.

The tour had three goals: to introduce the concept of Fleet Week to the public, to explain the serious purpose behind the public events (liaison between Navy and civilian disaster relief specialists), and to provide a brief history of the US Navy’s disaster relief work in the SF area and around the world. The script directed that the tour be graphics intensive, including four YouTube videos, interactive balloons, screen overlay animation, a live link to an existing online KMZ history of Bay Area earthquakes on a USGS site, and precisely synchronized professional narration.

Studio Cruz began work on the tour in early September. The YouTube videos were downloaded as Flash videos using RealPlayer, trimmed to the relevant sections using Moyea FLV Editor, then uploaded as new videos ready for embedding into the relevant parts of the tour. The script was split into 45 sections of between one and three sentences, and placeholder MP3s were created in the studio. These were later replaced by the professional narration. Photographs provided by the Navy were cropped and resaved as JPGs, and screen/ground overlays were built in Photoshop and saved out as 24-bit PNG files.

Building the tour took slightly over a week, with coding and graphics being made by Chris Yonge, principal of Studio Cruz. Since Google intended the tour to be revised and reused for future Fleet Weeks the KML code was extensively commented, down to the words spoken in each piece of narration. After the build stage, the placeholder narration audio files were replaced with the final professional versions. This required minor timing adjustments throughout the tour, but once that was done the tour was delivered and posted.

Google also wanted a video version of the tour for visitors to the Fleet Week site who did not have Google Earth. For clarity and quality this was done using the screen capture program Camtasia; the resulting AVI files were assembled in AfterEffects and adjusted. However, some parts of the tour did not capture well: in particular the slowdown caused by Camtasia operating in the background meant there was an unacceptable pause before the YouTube videos started. The decision was made, a few days before the deadline, to rewrite the tour specifically for the video capture. Animation, video, narration, and interactive balloons were removed from the KML file. The reduced tour was run and captured as a video in Camtasia, and the resulting files imported into AfterEffects. The removed items were then replaced as individual layers, resulting in much higher quality. The raw animation was around 14 Gb, which was compressed to 700 Mb for uploading to YouTube. It can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le5GqmV6ASg.

Both the tour and video were completed on time and to budget. The video alone had over nine thousand views the first weekend. Studio Cruz can be found at www.studiocruz.com.