3d imagery

Google Earth 3D imagery progress for 2016

December 27, 2016

Over the course of 2016, Google Earth received about 90,000 square kilometres of new 3D imagery (about the area of Portugal). This represents a significant slowdown in new area covered:

New area of 3D imagery by year in square kilometres.

New area of 3D imagery by month in square kilometres.

However, a lot of previously existing areas received updates, either with freshly captured imagery or reprocessed imagery, but such updates are impossible to track in terms of area.

Three new countries received imagery this year, Tunisia, Malaysia, and most recently Slovenia.

As always, a big thank you to all the GEB readers who contribute to our KML map of 3D areas by alerting us to new areas and/or drawing outlines. If you submit outlines please be sure to follow the guidelines.

Ljubljana, Slovenia.

3D volcanoes and 3D data corruption

September 29, 2016

Google recently released 3D imagery for Mount Fuji in Japan. However, we discovered that there are a number of squares of the imagery that appear only in low resolution. We have come across this problem before and interestingly another location with a similar problem is Mount Vesuvius in Italy.

Mount Fuji, Japan.

Mount Vesuvius, Italy.

A third volcano, Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, USA, also has 3D imagery, but does not have any problems with it:

Mount Saint Helens, Washington State, USA.

The problem with squares of blurred 3D is not restricted to volcanoes. We know of a number of other places around the world where the same issue occurs. For the ones we know about, download this KML file. If our readers know of any others, please let us know in the comments.

Thank you to GEB reader Samppa for letting us know about this one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

One location that had a similar problem a couple of years ago was Oslo, Norway. Oddly enough, that seemed to get fixed when the Google Earth client was updated.

Another type of 3D imagery anomaly is this one near Austin, Texas:

The above volcanoes are not the only areas where Google has captured 3D imagery outside urban areas. For a number of US parks see this post and for a number of other non-urban areas see this post.

Post-earthquake Kumamoto in Google Earth 3D

September 27, 2016

In April this year, the city of Kumamoto, Japan, suffered a series of large earthquakes. Google managed to capture aerial imagery of the city essentially during the event, after the first major event but before the largest shock and then captured another set of imagery from after the event. We had a look at what damage could be seen in the imagery, including a large number of landslides, collapsed buildings and a derailed train. From the overhead imagery it wasn’t easy to see the extent of the damage to buildings, even though we knew, based on ground level imagery, that there was severe damage in some locations. Now Google has updated the 3D imagery for part of Kumamoto with imagery captured after the event, and the extent of the damage to buildings is much clearer, especially because the roofs have been patched with light blue tarpaulin that is highly visible.

The suburb of Mashiki was the worst hit, and many houses are damaged beyond repair.

A historical building known as Janes’ Residence was completely destroyed. The rubble has been covered in the light blue tarpaulins

The Janes’ Residence was the first western-style house built in Kumamoto dating from 1871. It used to be in the grounds of Kumamoto Castle, but has been moved a number of times. Read more about it here.

Kumamoto Castle was badly damaged by the earthquake.

We have also created a Google Earth tour of the area showing all the light blue roofs, which you can view in Google Earth with this KML file or see in the YouTube video below.

Malaysia and Tunisia get 3D

September 20, 2016

Malaysia and Tunisia have recently received their first 3D imagery. Tunis and Sfax in Tunisia and Sungai Petani in Malaysia.

The interesting upside down triangle architecture of the Hôtel du Lac, Tunis.

Constructions sites are the easiest way to work out the date of 3D imagery. This construction site in Sungai Petani, Malaysia, tells us the 3D imagery was captured since the most recent satellite image from January 2016.

As we have previously mentioned Google appears to be slowing down in terms of new area covered by 3D. However, they are doing a significant amount of updates of existing areas.

Note that a few of the most recent finds for this month are not included in the above chart, as we have not yet finished drawing the outlines.

To see the full coverage of 3D imagery in Google Earth and find out what other recent additions there are, download this KML file.

York Minster in York, England.

Ships in Google Earth’s 3D imagery

September 16, 2016

We have long had a fascination with cruise ships in Google Earth. Cruise ships represent a significant amount of area and deserve to be mapped, but because they move from place to place this poses an interesting mapping problem.

Some time back we had started making a collection of placemarks for various ships in 3D, but never got around to completing it. In some cases, the name of the vessel can be seen in the imagery, but at other times, identifying it requires a bit of detective work. Yesterday, GEB reader Frank (not Frank Taylor), who also contributes outlines for our 3D imagery KML, sent us a collection of placemarks for cruise ships and ferries in 3D, which was much more comprehensive than ours. So, we have combined it with our collection and are providing it here in case our readers are interested.

Grab the collection here. We have implemented it as a network link and may update it over time, but do not guarantee that we will have time to do a lot of regular maintenance.

Remember that Google Earth does not have a ‘historical 3D’ feature, so when 3D imagery gets updated, the placemarks will no longer be correct. We found that a few of the placemarks we had created in the past no-longer have cruise ships at those locations. Also interesting is that some of the cruise ships in the imagery have since been sold and renamed or in some cases, such as the Sky Wonder, have since been scrapped.

A number of cruise ships appear more than once in the 3D imagery. For example:

Norwegian Pearl, in Seattle (west coast of the US).