Tours

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!

Touring the rebirth of Crissy Field

June 12, 2012

Located just east of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Crissy Field is a beautiful 100-acre national park that attracts more than one million visitors every year. However, it wasn’t long ago that the area where the park sits was nothing more than an abandoned dump.
When the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, visitors stood on Crissy Field to watch the opening. At the time, the field was an army airfield but years later it simply became a fenced-off eyesore.
Roughly 15 years ago, a campaign was started to help clean up the area and turn it into a valuable community resource. The restoration was completed in 2001 and the change is dramatic. Thanks to the incredible 3D buildings and trees in San Franciso, the park looks excellent in Google Earth.

The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has put together a very impressive tour that shows the changes to Crissy Park over the last century. The tour includes a full narration from Doug McConnell, along with photos, 3D buildings, and even some animations like the planes shown here:

To see the tour for yourself, you can view it in Google Earth with this KMZ file

or simply watch the video below.

For more, read the full blog entry on the Google Lat Long Blog.

Removing landmines with the help of Google Earth

June 11, 2012

The HALO Trust was formed in 1998 to help clear landmines from war-torn countries. The scope of this project is unbelievable — they’ve already cleared over 13 million landmines from over 414,000 acres of land!
They first visited the Google Earth Outreach team a few years ago, and have continued to make extensive use of Google Earth to aid in their mine-clearing efforts. They’ve even received a grant from Google Earth Outreach to help create their Explore a Minefield project.

They use Google Earth’s historical imagery feature to show how these countries are rebuilding after the mine removal. You can see that in action by loading this tour in Google Earth

or watching the video below:

To learn more about this project, you can read about it on the Google Lat Long Blog or visit www.HALOtrust.org

Some great updates from Meograph

May 23, 2012

Earlier this month we told you about Meograph, the “four-dimensional storytelling” engine, and they’ve been hard at work improving the system.

The new features include:
• Playback Control: Pause, rewind, and forward your way through a meograph.
• Google Maps: You now have the ability to view the meograph on Google Maps for those who don’t want to or can’t install the GE plug-in.
• No Excel: Previously, you needed to upload an Excel spreadsheet to create your meograph. That is no more, as things are beginning to smooth out.
• More context button: Allows you to quickly dig into more detail at any moment during the playback.
There is still more work to do, but it seems to be coming along quite nicely. Check it out for yourself at meograph.com.