-
KML Research Winners – Google announced the winners of their contest for the best cases of using KML for Research. Each winner will receive a prize pack including an iPod Touch, Garmin GPS, and Google swag. All entries will appear in the Google Earth Gallery. Bjorn Sandvik, who has appeared in GEB several times, was one of the winners and has shared his winning entry.
-
Narrated Tour Tutorial – The Google Earth Outreach team has created a nice tutorial on how to create a narrated tour using the new Google Earth Record Tour feature. via the March Sightseer.
-
Tour for Mountains – Appalachian Voices – the non-profit which is trying to raise awareness of the awful coal mining technique which simply blows the tops off mountains – has produced this excellent narrated GE 5 tour
which very effectively makes their points.
-
Mining Tour – A long-time GEB reader, and geologist, Jiro Shirota wrote to tell me about his latest GE project to share data. This time he has created a visualization tool for mining claims data
in Canada. What I like about this tool is that it has: 1) a custom search query tool using a placemark bubble; 2) you can see polygons for mining claim properties and when you put your mouse over them it tells you who has the claim; and 3) he has included a GE 5 tour to show off the data.
Tours
Heli-Ski Tour in Google Earth
A few weeks ago, Oliver Davis, who is CEO of Concept3D (which does 3D modeling for Google Earth for one thing), took a holiday trip to British Columbia and went on a Helicopter Ski run. Being a savvy Google Earth user, he took along a GPS device and recorded his track both in the air, and while skiing down the snowy mountains. He got one of his engineers to produce a Google Earth 5 tour of the heli-ski GPS track which lets you fly along his trip. You’ll have to use your imagination for the sounds, and the pauses for putting on skis, and the strenuous, but exhilirating, runs down the mountain. But, you get to enjoy the views, and really get a sense of what a heli-ski trip would be like. Oliver posted about his trip and the tour at his blog, and they created a video showing the tour here:
To get the full experience, you should download their GE 5 tour file here

Google Earth 5 Tour Roundup
Google Earth 5’s most powerful new features is the new Tour capability. At its most basic level Record Tour provides a fast and easy way for people to share with others a demonstration of some aspect of Google Earth and KML content, and the ability to add voice narration. (See a tutorial by Richard Treeves on creating basic tours). But, with a little KML coding, the Tour function allows much more powerful scripting of Google Earth demonstrations, 3D animations, movie-like camera action, and the ability to add professional audio overlays.
Here is a brief review of some of the early examples of Tours done with GE 5:
-
Jimmy Buffet
– This demonstration, created by Google for the GE 5 announcement event, was significant. Certainly the first with a music audio track with the approval of the artist. The demo includes a tour of Hawaii and the ocean while highlighting the locations of Jimmy Buffet’s concert tour there. It uses a colorful image overlay for a title of the tour, and points out significant locations as it flies along. A great demonstration of the potential.
-
Flight 1549
– This tour by Jeral Poskey is really amazing. It re-enacts the flight of 1549 using GE 5 tour functions. The first thing you’ll notice is that he’s included several audio overlays from the FAA of the controllers and pilots speaking on the radios during the event. The moments after they realize the emergency shows a flurry of 8 simultaneous streams of urgent discussions. You can also here how calmly Solly (the pilot) reacts to the situation. Not only that, but the author has added a model of the Intrepid aircraft carrier which is near where the plane crash landed in the river. And, he’s simulated the motion of the plane in the river after it landed and the currents drifted it down the river. Turn on the 3D Buildings layer while its playing to get more realism. Read Jeral’s post for more details.
-
San Francisco Tour
– Brian Flood, author of the popular GIS tool called Arc2Earth, is working on a tool to make sophisticated tours for GE 5. He has already created a couple of demonstrations showing cinematography-like camera movements. See this tour of San Francisco. He also did one for New York
. These are really cool tours which show how the Tour function can show Google Earth’s 3D features like a movie while only requiring a relatively small download. Add music and other annotations and you could have a flying documentary.
-
Oil Rig Tour
– Gerardo Paz has created a model of a 3D oil rig. He created a Tour to not only show the rig, but also demonstrate some geologic features under the rig, and a 3D animation of a helicopter taking off from the rig. This tour is an excellent demonstration of GE 5’s ability to do some fancy 3D animation.
-
More 3D Animations – James Stafford, who has created many examples of powerful Google Earth features over the last couple of years, has created several examples illustrating some of the animation capabilities with GE 5’s touring. First an animation of a 3D jet flying
, next a shape transformation animation
changing France into Spain, and finally a trip illustration
using the new GE 5 techniques.
-
Glider Tour – Another interesting example of the Tour function showing how you can take old GPS tracks and turn them into powerful tours. Read the post for more details.
(By the way, don’t forget you can use the tour control panel (in the lower left) to control the playback – including fast forwarding, backwards, and pausing.)
These are all early examples just illustrating the potential. As GE 5 matures out of beta, and as these, and other developers, learn more about the capabilities. I expect there will be some amazing GE 5 tours in our future. Kudos to these early adopters of the technology!
Links: Missing Atlantis, In the Navy, Predators Not Censored, Utrecht Building Plans, English Lake District
-
Missing Atlantis – I saw the story of Atlantis being “found” in Google Earth appear in several places late last week. Someone was all excited that there was a strange grid on the bottom of the ocean floor in the new GE bathymetry. Their conclusion? Atlantis! This was obviously not true, but it was picked up by so many news sources. That got Stefan going on about media stupidity. And soon Google had a spokesperson explain to reporters what it really was: Sonar tracks from a ship. But, the story about Atlantis persisted, so now Google has posted a full explanation on their blogs (both the official Google blog and LatLong). Google made sure not to dispel the notion that Atlantis may yet be found. One other interesting twist: The spot in the news was actually first discovered when the new bathymetry was first released as 2D imagery back in January and discussed at the GEC. The real story is that the “gridded” survey location was actually conducted to evaluate the location for possible nuclear waste disposal (unknown whether anyone decided they could do it).
-
In the Navy – John Bailey, who in real life studies volcanoes at the Alaska Volcano Observatory & Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, decided to experiment with the new GE 5 Tour functions. He created this amusing tour
which shows off some of the new features of GE 5 – in particular the ocean. Check it out – the music choice alone is worth a laugh.
-
Predators not censored – Stefan Geens (OgleEarth) made a detailed analysis of the recent news reports about censorship of US military Predator drones found in imagery of Pakistan (but, no longer in the GE imagery). He concluded that Google must have actually censored imagery. But, Google came back to him after his post and explained what really happened. So, Stefan has now posted a retraction that Google had simply updated imagery in the area and the older image just hasn’t been put in the historical imagery archive. The new historical imagery archive is still far from complete – especially in remote areas such as the airport in Pakistan.
-
Utrecht Building Plans – Michiel Quist sent me this link to his stunning work creating dozens of 3D building models in Utrecht. The interesting collection not only shows current buildings. He has produced a time animation which lets you watch how the buildings change over the last few years, and up until the year 2021. The 3D time animation KML
is 25 Mbytes in size (he explained to me it was designed for internal use at a business, so size wasn’t an issue). An amazing job which must have taken quite some time to produce (considering the number of models)!
-
English Lake District – Justin Farrell of the UK sent me his tour of the English Lake District. The tour
uses the GE plugin in your browser. I like the way he uses simple button controls to guide you through the tour. Nice work Justin!
This Google Earth File Could Make you Sick
WARNING: If you are prone to motion sickness – especially air sickness – you might not want to watch the following Google Earth tour!
This wasn’t the intention, but several people who have seen the tour have been a little queasy afterwards. The file is yet another demonstration of the capabilities of the new Record Tour feature in Google Earth 5. One of the engineers at Google behind the development of the KML standard and the open source libkml is Michael Ashbridge. He took one of the first GPS tracks of a hang glider (or paraglider) which was converted to a KML file (back in 2005) and wrote an application to convert the track into a GE 5 tour which lets you follow the glider as it catches thermals to gain altitude near some mountains in Idaho. Before I say more, just go check out the tour in Google Earth 5. Once it loads, double click “Linestring Tour“.

Michael’s program produced the tour by following the GPS track and shows you the 3D view along the “string”. It’s a really cool experience (if you don’t get sick!). GPS data is typically a bit inaccurate in altitude and only updated periodically (maybe once per second). But, the Tour function in GE 5 does a good job of interpolating between points to smooth the transitions. Even so, the ride gets a bit bumpy in places. The tour really gets interesting if you use the “Fast Forward” buttons on the Tour slider in the lower left.
While the tour is playing, if you grab areas with land with the mouse, you can drag your view to look in a different direction. After you let go with the mouse, the view will move back to following the track. This is a great feature which makes tours even more powerful because it takes a Tour from just being like a recorded video into a live 3D Google Earth recorded experience. But, there is a “bug” which doesn’t let you grab the sky to change your view (which will hopefully be fixed when GE 5 goes out of beta).