steven ho

Taiwan from Above

December 11, 2013

Steven Ho has done some great work with Google Earth over the years. He’s shown us tours of mountaineering trips, a panorama from the top of Mount Everest, a tribute to Steve Jobs and much more.

A friend of his, Chi Po-Lin, has created a documentary titled “Taiwan from Above“. Steven has taken the amazing aerial trips from the documentary and recreated them in Google Earth. Specifically, Steven says:

I used two windows – one in, one out. The GPS route I got from Chi, which he made one day in 2008. This trip started from Puli, then flew to Central Mountains , Yushan Mountain, Sun Moon Lake and then back. It is a 240 km long, 1 hour 32 minute flight time trip.

You can read more about it it on Steven’s blog, or try it for yourself using the Google Earth Plugin on this page. The plugin version has varying levels of success depending on your browser, so you can also download the KMZ files to load them directly in Google Earth:

Great work, Steven!

Great use of Google Earth by the Urban Planning Department of Taipei

April 11, 2013

The Urban Planning Department of the Taipei City Government has built some amazing map-based features on their site that are worth checking out. The first is their swipe map, which allows you to select two of 16 timeframes and compare the two by dragging the center bar left and right. The map is similar to what we’ve seen before with items like this before/after comparison of the Tuscaloosa storm in 2011 and it works very well. The Taipei page is only available in Chinese, but it’s easy enough to understand how it works.

Their other noteworthy site is their 3D viewer,

which shows the city in the Google Earth plugin, but with many more 3D buildings than can normally be found in Google Earth.

The building creation process for the city was apparently semi-automated, though details are sparse on how exactly it was done. Ultimately I expect we’ll see the new 3D Imagery replace the handful of 3D buildings currently found in Taipei, but for now this is a pretty robust solution.
Thanks to Steven Ho for letting us know about these!

Steven Ho creates an excellent tour of a recent mountaineering trip

October 17, 2012

Steven Ho has built some amazing things with Google Earth over the years, including things such as the Trip View Bowl, the World Marathon Majors, a panorama from the top of Mount Everest and a neat tribute to Steve Jobs where he turns Google Earth into a giant apple.
Steven is back again, this time with a tour that shows off a recent trip he went on. However, as we’ve come to expect from Steven, it has a lot of extra goodies built into it. You’ll see a 3D torocat bus driving them to the mountain, hiker icons as they walk, an animated path and photos that appear throughout the tour. It’s quite a neat way to see what the adventure was like for him.

To see it for yourself you can browse it here using the Google Earth plug-in,

by downloading this KMZ file,

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

or by watching the video below.

Great job Steven!

A tribute to Steve Jobs in Google Earth

October 13, 2011

Steve Jobs undoubtedly had an effect on almost all of the technology that we use today. While he had relatively little impact on products like Google Earth (because Apple never created competing technology to help push things forward), his impact reached all of us.
That said, geospatial technologies can be used to help honor people in a unique way, such as the timeline of Louis Zamperini’s life.
Similarly, Google Maps Mania recently posted a timeline of Steve Jobs’ life. Steven Ho, who recently built the Trip View Bowl visualization, has built a nice tribute to Jobs in Google Earth. It turns Earth into a giant apple, with a silhouette of Jobs’ face on the side.

It’s easily one of the largest 3D models we’ve seen, similar to the pumpkin or the giant mustached smiley face we show you for movember each year. The giant apple is part of a short tour that he created, which also includes music and a quote about Steve.
To see it for yourself, you can view it with the Google Earth Plug-in, via this KMZ file

, or by watching the short video from Steven below:

See the Trip View Bowl in Google Earth

September 28, 2011

Coming out of Taiwan each year, “Trip View Bowls” are popular works of art that show aerial artwork of a city, drawn onto the inside of a blue bowl. The artwork is quite impressive and amazingly detailed.

GEB reader Steven Ho, who we’ve shown you before for items such as his Mount Everest panorama, has built some very innovative Google Earth files to show off the 2011 bowl.
The first is a tour (KMZ

) that shows the bowl, then swoops around and shows the entire earth inside the bowl, then dives back down to Taipei again. If you turn on the [3D Buildings] layer, you’ll see that he’s aligned it quite well (though the 3D coverage in Taipei is still quite weak).

Here is a quick video of the tour if you aren’t able to access Google Earth right now:

The second is a huge 3D model of the earth sitting inside of the bowl (KMZ

). There’s not much to do with it, but it’s a crazy sight to see and certainly one of the largest 3D models I’ve ever seen.

Lastly is a very high-res look at the imagery on the inside of the bowl, viewable using the Google Earth photo viewer (KMZ

). As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, the artwork inside the bowl is remarkably detailed, and this file really helps to show that.

You can read more about it on Steven’s blog. Great work, Steven!