The amazing things about Google Earth
Rich Treves at Google Earth Design has provided some great resources over the years such as an animated flood map of London and a variety of Google Earth-based resources for teachers.
He recently reviewed the Google Earth Tour Builder and now has produced a nice video to help show people how to use it.
It’s an amazing tool and has wide array of possibilities. Check out his full post here, or try it for yourself at tourbuilder.withgoogle.com.
Great work, Rich!
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.
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!
The story of Saroo Brierley is an amazing one, which we first told you about back in March of 2012. When he was young, Saroo become separated from his family at a train station in India and found himself 1500 kilometers away. Thanks to Google Earth, he was able to find his way home years later. Here’s a brief video Google just released that tells his amazing story:
When searching for his home, Saroo compared Google Earth to being able to fly like a super hero:
In Saroo’s words, “It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, ‘Does this match?’ And when you say, ‘No,’ you keep on going and going and going.”
Saroo has since published a book titled “A Long Way Home” that details his experience. You can read more about Saroo’s journey on the Official Google Blog.
Google Earth is an amazing tool to visualize trends and growth when it comes to real estate. In the past we’ve shown you some tools that use historical imagery to show how things have changed, such as Google’s Timelapse project and this impressive visualization of urban growth in Spain.
Today we wanted to show you three impressive videos that use Google Earth to show historical real estate information in a very compelling way. They take three major american cities (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) and show the growth of them over the past 150 years. The videos begin with a flat city, then slowly begin dropping in colored polygons for the buildings in the order in which they were built.
It’s an impressive set of videos and a very effective way to show this kind of growth.
You can read more about these on The Source website.
A few days ago we shared the Boulder, Colorado crisis response map with you, as the area is continuing to be inundated with rain and flooding. As they continue to fight the water, another interesting battle is emerging: Falcon UAV against the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Falcon has a hand-launched drone aircraft that can fly for roughly an hour and automatically generate very accurate maps of the ground. Here is a quick video showing how the drone is launched:
As for the results, you can see a snippet of their work in Colorado below or download the KMZ file here (warning: 500MB) to see it in Google Earth. It’s quite remarkable, especially considering the speed with which the imagery can be captured, georeferenced and shared.
Unfortunately, FEMA has told them they’re no longer allowed to fly the drone. In fact, they were told that their “request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested.”
As IEEE Spectrum is quick to point out, we’re only hearing one side of the story. FEMA may have a very legitimate reason for grounding the drone. However, considering all circumstances it seems that it would be quite valuable to have that aircraft capturing fresh imagery for the area.
I’m hoping that FEMA releases a statement of some sort about this issue, as it’s reflecting quite poorly on them so far. Check out the full article for yourself over on IEEE Spectrum.