fireworks

Celebrate Chinese Spring Festival in Google Earth

February 23, 2016

Here at GEB we have traditionally celebrated the new year with a Google Earth fireworks animation created by Steven Ho. This past new year we decided to expand on the idea by allowing you to create fireworks at the coordinates of your choice. This, in turn, has inspired Steven Ho to create a new animation to celebrate the Chinese Spring Festival, (also known as Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year).

His animation shows Chinese couplets falling from the sky, with the camera slowly rotating around the location you select – all set to music. Chinese couplets are a popular form of Chinese poetry that consists of a pair of lines of verse that match up in a number of different ways. You can learn a bit more about them on the Wikipedia page. They are popular for decorating doorways and also often used during celebrations, such as the Chinese Spring Festival.

He has also created a similar animation for the Taiwan Lantern Festival, which shows lanterns flying up into the sky at night.

To see YouTube videos of both animations and create animations for the location of your choice, see the full post on Steven’s blog.

3D Fireworks in Google Earth

December 31, 2014

By the time you read this, it will already be 2015 in the Line Islands of Kiribati, as it is the first location on Earth to celebrate the new year. It is an interesting fact about the peculiarities of the dateline, that London, Kiribati (GMT+14), will celebrate its New Year before Alofi, Niue (GMT-11), begins its New Year’s Eve. For more on the oddities of the world’s time zones, see this YouTube video on the subject.

Here at GEB we have been celebrating the new year with virtual fireworks since January 2011, when Steven Ho, whose work we have featured a number of times, created an animation of the 2011 Taipei 101 fireworks as a Google Earth tour.

View it in Google Earth by downloading this KML file.

3D Fireworks in Google Earth

December 31, 2013

In celebration of the new year many people shoot off fireworks, and we love to show off the work of GEB reader ‘Steven’ who took it a step further and created some great 3D fireworks in Google Earth! As you can read about in his blog, the fireworks are intended to duplicate the 2011 Taiwan New Years Eve show, based on the simulation that you can view here.

As you can see from the photo above, the fireworks aren’t just simple animated images — they’re fully 3D! Some of them shoot into the sky, and some wrap around the Taipei 101 tower. As Steven points out in his post, animations like this are only possible because of the work of 3D modelers that created the buildings. In this case, credit goes to user Tang Huang who created the exceptionally detailed model of the Taipei 101 tower.

To see the fireworks in action, you can view them here using the Google Earth Plug-in, download this KMZ file, or watch the video below:

For another fun way to view fireworks, Keir at Google Maps Mania built a map that allows you to view video from celebrations around the world. It’s a simple map that does a great job.

Happy New Year!