Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


venice

Valentine’s Day in Google Earth

Tomorrow is Valentine’s day. As we have done in past years, we are sharing a collection of hearts from Google Earth Hacks. You can also view them in the YouTube video below:

Here is our Valentine’s Day message from Google Earth Blog, powered by GeoGreeting.com.

You could also take a virtual romantic vacation by touring Venice in Google Earth, as it has just received new 3D imagery. We do not recommend taking a Gondola ride as Google’s 3D does not handle water very well and the canals are quite bumpy.

Venice
Venice, Italy. Be sure to try turning on ‘Historical Imagery’ to compare the new 3D mesh with the older style 3D building models.

While researching this post we were made aware of how many sights in Google Earth are moments in time as well as space.

Marry Me D
This marriage proposal in a field that we looked at in 2006 is now part of the suburbs.

We couldn’t even find the Marriage proposal in Street View from this post. It is right outside the GooglePlex and has over 50 different dates of Street View, but as far as we could tell, the one with the marriage proposal in is missing.

Google Street View imagery released in Venice

Over the past few years, we’ve seen Google use some great techniques to bring Street View imagery to unique places.  They’ve taken some of their devices and captured imagery from a snowmobile, a railroad, hiking the Grand Canyon and even diving in the ocean.  By loading their Street View “trekker” onto some of the famous gondolas in Venice, we get to experience those canals for ourself!

venice

To show more about how this project came together, Google has put together a great behind-the-scenes series of pages to show what they’ve done, including this video:

For more, check out this post on the Official Google Blog to read more about this project, or you can check out this post of ours to learn how to use Street View inside of Google Earth.