Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Tours

Excellent Google Earth tour of 1825 Greek Independence battle

The tour features in Google Earth can be an excellent way to show historical events. A great example of that is with the various tours that Colin Hazelhurst created to show Captain James Cook’s exploration of Australia, or Peter Olsen’s tour that showed the fateful voyage of the Costa Concordia.
Dimi Christopoulos recently sent us a tour that he created that showcases a historical battle that took place near his village during the Greek Independence fight in 1825 against the Turks.

battle.jpg

The site is completely in Greek, but the tour is amazing. It features various overlays, music, voiceovers and images. Even in a foreign language (to me), I was able to follow most of the action. It’s very well done and I encourage you to view the full tour on his site.
Great work Dimi!

Creating amazing Google Earth tours with TourMaker

Last month we showed you Paul van Dinther’s amazing “A-tour” — a nine-screen set-up that is an incredible way to view Google Earth tours.
To keep things running smooth and stable, the system actually shows various videos captured from Google Earth, which Paul loads ahead of time. The result is stunning, but building those videos has proven to be quite an effort. To help with that, Paul has created a tool called “TourMaker” that does much of the work for him. While building it, his system looks something like this:

tourmaker.jpg

The result is some very impressive tours, such as the one seen here:

Here’s more of what Paul had to say about it:

A cubic spline is fitted through each location but also for each camera orientation parameter such as heading, tilt and roll. The result is a silky smooth camera animation that can be fined tuned by adjusting any of the 18 views.

A spline doesn’t care how far apart each position node is so in addition to the six splines controlling the camera I may need a seventh spline that controls time but the speed can be controlled quite nicely by careful node placement.

Tourmaker is able to output KML tour data based on any duration and field of view. However, for A-tour I need 9 tour files for each display. For this the tourmaker can output a project file that can be processed by my existing proprietary tour manipulation software. Since all these are internal tools it will do the job.

The software isn’t yet available to the public, but Paul is hoping to fine-tune it and release it sometime soon. In the meantime, you can grab this KMZ file to play the Grand Canyon tour for yourself.

Steven Ho creates an excellent tour of a recent mountaineering trip

Steven Ho has built some amazing things with Google Earth over the years, including things such as the Trip View Bowl, the World Marathon Majors, a panorama from the top of Mount Everest and a neat tribute to Steve Jobs where he turns Google Earth into a giant apple.
Steven is back again, this time with a tour that shows off a recent trip he went on. However, as we’ve come to expect from Steven, it has a lot of extra goodies built into it. You’ll see a 3D torocat bus driving them to the mountain, hiker icons as they walk, an animated path and photos that appear throughout the tour. It’s quite a neat way to see what the adventure was like for him.

steven-ho.jpg

To see it for yourself you can browse it here using the Google Earth plug-in, by downloading this KMZ file, or by watching the video below.


Great job Steven!

Google Earth A to Z: Terrain, Trees and Tours

Terrain
Since the first days of Google Earth, the 3D terrain has been most of the most amazing features in the program. It makes everything look better, and creates stunning views of the largest mountains in the world (such as K2, seen below).

K2

3D terrain is enabled by default, but you can edit it by playing with the “Terrain Quality” settings in the main [Tools] > [Options] menu.
Trees
Introduced in late 2010, sprouting out of the 3D terrain, is the 3D trees feature. The initial release featured more than 80,000,000 trees in a handful of cities, and Google has added a few more since then. However, the new 3D imagery seems to be replacing the 3D trees so I’m not sure we’ll see any more cities get the trees. Google hasn’t announced anything about that, but we haven’t seen any new trees added in months, and their focus seems to be on the 3d imagery. Regardless, the trees look amazing and are a great addition to Google Earth.
3D trees

Tours
“Tours” in Google Earth are a great feature where you can record a path for someone to follow, then allow them to watch it for themselves (including audio, image and video overlays). A great example is the “Rebirth of Crissy Field” tour that we posted a few months ago.
An unrelated but similarly-named feature are the new “Tour Guides” that go along with 3D imagery in a few cities. Those are built-in tours that show off highlights in the new imagery. They’re currently only available on mobile devices, but the imagery should be out on the desktop versions of Google Earth before the end of the year and presumably the tours will come with it.
mobile tours

Meograph releases an enhanced authoring tool

I’ve been a big fan of Meograph since it was released earlier this year, as it’s a great tool to help show news stories using a heavy dose of geo reference. The big downside to it was that creating a “meograph” of your own was a fairly complicated thing to do. With their latest update, the authoring tool has become much easier to use, as you can see from the demo below:


They’ve also just added a new feature that showcases a fresh meograph each morning with highlights from the 2012 Presidential Election coverage. You can find this daily feature at www.meograph.com/election2012.
Here is an embedded version of yesterday’s update, which makes great use of photos, videos, audio, all with geo reference behind the content.


Meograph is shaping up to be a very powerful tool, especially with these new authoring tools and the continued refinements to the service. It’ll be interesting to see if adoption of the tool continues to grow in future months. Try it for yourself at meograph.com.