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Google Earth plugin

Tour maker with the Google Earth API

November 13, 2015

With the end of life of the Google Earth API approaching, Paul van Dinther of PlanetInAction.com has decided to release a tool he created for his own use that uses the Google Earth plugin for making Google Earth Tours. Paul van Dinther has created a number of games based on the Google Earth API that we have featured on this blog, possibly the most sophisticated of which is a ship simulator. When he realized the Google Earth API would eventually be shut down Paul decided to base the next version, Ships 2 Career, on Google Maps instead. It will lack the 3D that the Google Earth API provides but we believe it will still be a great game and popular with ship enthusiasts. You can follow the development on his Google+ page.

The tour maker can be found here. To use it you will need to open it in a browser that still supports the Google Earth plugin. We tested it in Firefox but we believe it should also work in Safari.

Paul has provided the following instructions for using it:

Navigate to the location where you want the tour to start. (Sorry, there is no find location).

Set up your first start view exactly as you would like it to appear. You can use all the Google Earth navigation methods to set up your view.

Click the “Add view” button to add the first view to your view list. By default the speed at that point is 10 meters per second (more about that later).

Set up your next view and click “Add view” again. You need to add the third point before the track is drawn. Make sure you keep the spacing between the points reasonably even, because otherwise the cubic spline (a smooth curve between points) becomes hard to control and starts to do funny loops.

Now you have a spline with 3 points. You can left click and drag any of the numbered view markers in the Google Earth plugin to adjust the path. The spline will flip to a low resolution spline while you are manipulating the points.

Each point is represented in the view list in the right sidebar. It shows the point index, an input box for speed in metres per second, an input box for the view altitude and a delete link. You can click on any entry in the list and the Google Earth plugin view will teleport to that view.

IMPORTANT: While on that view you can adjust your camera tilt and heading (but not roll). You do this by holding down CTRL and left-mouse-drag the view (standard Google Earth behaviour). The new camera orientation will be stored for that view point as long as the camera latitude and longitude coordinates did not change. Both heading and tilt are controlled via the spline.

The altitude is also controlled by the spline. You can change the altitude of a point by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the point. Alternatively you can change the altitude in the view list (second input box).

Timing: Each point will have a speed defined for it in meters per second. The speed varies smoothly as it is also controlled by the spline. However, it is possible to lock the duration of the tour to a precise time by entering the duration in the “Duration (sec)” input box. All the speeds are then scaled to match total duration. Clear the Duration field if you don’t want the speeds to be scaled. By default the duration is set to 60 seconds.

Once you hare happy with your track you can save it by clicking on “Save project” this causes a file with the project name to be generated and placed in your download folder. Use this file later if you want to work on this track. To load a project, refresh the page and click “Choose File” and select the file you just saved. Crude but there still is no decent local file implementation in browsers.

You can specify a Field of View (FOV) for the tour. The default Google Earth FOV is 60 degrees but you can adjust that. FOV is not animated and applies to the whole tour.

Once you have your tour and the path looks reasonable, the tour can be tested by clicking “Test kml”. The program will generate KML and show it in the text area under the view list. You can copy and paste the KML straight into Google Earth Desktop without turning it into a file. The test feature will also load the KML data into the plugin and the tour starts automatically. “Generate KML” does the same but doesn’t start a tour in the plugin.

The “Make project” button is not relevant for you. It produces data that I import into my own software that translates the tour for each of my 9 screens.

“Rebuild spline”, “update track” and “rebuild track” are debug functions. However, if you update the altitude of a point in the view list you will want to click “Rebuild track” to see the changes.

Paul also says:

This has to be the ugliest program ever written. But it does the job I need it to do. It’s not very user friendly but I produced amazing animations with it.”

Filed Under: GE Plugin Tagged With: Google Earth plugin, paul van dinther, planetinaction.com

Google Earth API – one more month to live

November 12, 2015

In December last year Google announced the deprecation of the Google Earth API (also known as the Google Earth Plug-in). It is set to stop working one month from now on December 12th, 2015. The documentation page for the Google Earth API states that it will be shut down on that date.

The reason Google has given for terminating the Google Earth API product is that it is reliant on an ageing technology called NPAPI which is not considered secure and most browsers are dropping support for it or have already done so. In addition, it was never available on mobile platforms.

Google Chrome never included support for NPAPI in its 64-bit version released in September, 2014. The 32-bit version of Chrome gradually dropped support for NPAPI (and with it the Google Earth API) initially making it harder to access in April, 2015, and finally dropping support altogether with the release of Version 45 in October.

We believe Safari still supports it.

It still works in Firefox and we still find many uses for it, such as for finding recent imagery releases. Download this KML file to see the location of imagery in Google Earth that was captured in November (less than 12 days old!).

The Google Earth API has many great uses. We showcased a number of them in this series of posts earlier this year. We at GEB believe Google should consider allowing the GE plugin to continue to work at least until a suitable replacement is in place (with the next version of Google Earth, perhaps?).

If a complete replacement is not planned, Google should consider making some of the services available via the Maps API or entirely new APIs. For many of the most common uses, simply adding a few more features to the Google Maps API would make a big difference. Currently it is not possible to use the 3D imagery or tilt the view in the JavaScript Google Maps API, although it is possible with the Android version of the API. We use the historical imagery information quite a lot, which could be provided as a standalone API.


My flying skills could use some work. GEFS Online is a popular flight simulator based on the Google Earth API.

Filed Under: GE Plugin Tagged With: Google Earth plugin

Finding imagery updates with the Google Earth plugin

September 7, 2015

The last time Google released an imagery update map was as part of the new ‘Voyager’ layer introduced at the end of June. An anonymous reader let us know about a number of recent updates in Europe, and also suggested that there might be a way to automatically find imagery updates. We think this is a good idea, especially given our recent experimentation with historical imagery density.

We showed you in this post a map of North Korea with areas highlighted in red that change when you move the timeslider between two recent dates. However, upon further analysis, it seems that method is unreliable because Google Earth does not necessarily get the historical imagery correct when you are zoomed out too far, as we explored in this post. It is a useful technique, but requires quite lot of manual effort, is somewhat unreliable and it is difficult to display the results in Google Earth.

So instead, we decided to try doing it with the Google Earth plugin. The first problem we encountered is that the latest version of Google Chrome, Version 45, released at the beginning of September no longer supports NPAPI plugins (including the Google Earth plugin). We knew this was coming and since April this year Chrome has required a special setting to run NPAPI plugins. So, we used Firefox, which still supports the Google Earth plugin for now.

The main problem is that the Earth is a very big place. A fine-grained search similar to what we have been doing with historical imagery density could easily take months. However, there is a feature of Google Earth that we can take advantage of to make it easier. If you zoom out, the time slider shows all the dates within the view, and then reduces the list as you zoom in. So it is possible to first scan the globe at low resolution and then only do higher resolution passes in areas where you know there is imagery in the date range you are looking for.

A few caveats before we present the results:
1. As we discussed in this post, when Google first adds imagery to Google Earth it usually appears in the default layer and only a week or so later gets added to historical imagery. So our technique will not find the very latest additions.
2. As we saw when we analyzed the ‘Satellite imagery updates’ layer, a significant proportion of the updates that Google makes to the imagery is not recent imagery. We are only looking for recent imagery and will not find updates of older imagery. Thus, if Google does eventually release a new ‘imagery updates’ map we expect it to have significantly more areas than our map.
3. As we have mentioned before, the Google Earth plugin often reports erroneous figures where there is no historical imagery but there is some nearby. This is especially common along coast lines.
4. This is our first attempt and we have not checked it for accuracy.

We searched for all imagery newer than July 1st, 2015 and here are the results:

Download the KML here.

We also had a look at some of the locations and identified and outlined the actual areas. We did find a few areas that got missed by the search so it looks like we need to play around with some of the settings for greater accuracy.

Download the KML file here. Remember that the outlining was done manually and not very carefully, so it is not very accurate, nor is it complete.

Filed Under: Site News Tagged With: Google Earth plugin, historical imagery

Chrome now making it harder to use the Google Earth plugin

April 17, 2015

[Update: As of Chrome version 45, released circa 1st September, 2015, Chrome no longer supports NPAPI at all. ]

In June last year the Google Chrome team announced that they would be ending support for NPAPI based plugins by September 2014. NPAPI is an ageing technology used by, most notably, Java, Silverlight and the Google Earth plugin. It is being dropped largely because it is considered a potential security risk.

In September Google released a 64-bit version of Google Chrome that did not include support for the Google Earth plugin or other NPAPI based plugins. However, the 32-bit version still supported it and has continued to support it. Over time, however, Chrome has been making it increasingly difficult to run NPAPI plugins, requiring the user to explicitly allow a plugin to run before displaying it.

Now, Google has just released Chrome version 42 that drops support for NPAPI plugins by default. It is still possible to get them back is via a Chrome flag, but presumably that option will soon be disabled too.

How to reenable NPAPI
For now, if you really need the Google Earth plugin in Chrome 32-bit, you can reenable NPAPI by entering the url: chrome://flags/#enable-npapi in the address bar then selecting ‘Enable’ below the ‘Enable NPAPI’ section then relaunch the browser.

The Google Earth plugin itself was deprecated in December and is set to stop working on 12th December 2015.

Firefox is also slowly phasing out NPAPI plugins and as far as we know the latest Internet Explorer only allows them in the 32 bit version in compatibility mode and not at all in the 64-bit version.

Filed Under: GE Plugin Tagged With: Google Earth plugin

Google Earth plugin showcase: Trans Taiwan Ultra-Marathon

April 1, 2015

This is the thirteenth in our series showcasing the Google Earth plugin. Today’s story demonstrates that although the Google Earth plugin has been deprecated it is still very much a working product and can be used for projects that do not need to be kept alive beyond its expiry date of December 12, 2015. The biggest downside is that most browsers nowadays require you to allow the plugin to run, which may put off your website visitors.

Today we are looking at a project from Steven Ho, whose excellent work we have looked at many times in the past. He has created a set of Google Earth tours for the 2015 Trans Taiwan Ultra-Marathon which can be viewed here using the Google Earth plugin.

In addition to a map of the route and tours of each leg of the race, when the race is in progress the live positions of some of the runners is displayed. This is achieved via an app on their cell phones. We have noticed that even during a leg of the race, not all racers are on the track, suggesting that some have either dropped out, or lent their cell phones to other people. He has also included the option to see ‘rabbits’ which are a set of markers used to indicate the minimum pace expected of the runners. Read more about it here.

The race has been running since the 28th of March and continues until this Saturday April 4th, 2015. Each leg starts at 6 am Taiwan time.

waiting to start
Runners waiting to start a leg of the race.


A leg of the race in progress.

For those wishing to view the tours directly in Google Earth rather than via the plugin, Steven has also provided a KMZ file to download.

Read more about it on his blog.

Filed Under: GE Plugin Tagged With: Google Earth plugin, Google Earth plugin showcase, steven ho

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