voyager

Google recently added some new Voyager tours titled ‘I Am Amazon’ featuring various stories from the Amazon. These tours are exclusively for the new browser-based Google Earth and the Android app. Read more about the tours on Google’s blog. This announcement came shortly after Google added Brazilian indigenous territories to their mapping products.

At the announcement event for the ‘I am Amazon’ Google Earth Director Rebecca Moore made an interesting comment to Reuters. She mentioned that Google plans to allow the public to share their stories via the Voyager platform at some point in the future (two to three years). This has led to speculation that it may become ‘the next Great social network’. It is certainly a great idea and we have previously suggested it when Google released the new browser based Google Earth.

So while we wait, what opportunities exist for sharing today?

Since the very early days of Google Earth, there has been the Google Earth Community, a forum where Google Earth enthusiasts share interesting locations and a wealth of information about them. However, the community is not integrated into Google Earth and is independent of Google.

Sharing geolocated photos can be done via Google Maps, and although accessing those photos in Google Earth classic currently doesn’t work, they are visible in the new browser based Google Earth. Panoramio, formerly the most popular way to share panoramic photos via Google Earth, was discontinued earlier this year and the photos will likely be removed from Google Earth this November.

Google Earth used to be partially integrated with Google Maps Gallery, a site where users could easily share maps. However, Google Maps Gallery relied on another Google product, Google Maps Engine, which was discontinued in early 2016, so there is no longer a good public map sharing site linked to Google Earth.

You can, of course, share your Google Earth content via any other platform in the form of KML files, which users can download and view in Google Earth. If you want to create Voyager-like tours for the new Google Earth, then be sure to check out the tour maker by geteach that we had a look at in April. If you want to create dynamic content that changes over time, then look into KML network links.

We often get asked by GEB readers how to upgrade to the ‘live’ version of Google Earth. Unfortunately, no such version exists and all imagery in Google Earth is dated – and in many places, the latest imagery, both over-head and Street View (where it exists), is several years old. However, it is possible to see some live content in Google Earth. For example, Google has recently added a new Voyager tour to the web / Android version of Google Earth that features bear cams (web cams looking at bears). Read more about it in Google’s blog post.

The first ‘bear cam’ we looked at featured a bear fishing live on camera.

For more web cams, in Google Earth classic, enable the Gallery->Webcams.travel layer. Keep in mind that most web cams do not show live video, but instead, a series of images captured at intervals, and it is not unusual for them to be out of date. So be sure to look for a time stamp before assuming that the image you see is current.

The closest one can get to live satellite imagery is feeds from weather satellites (as are used to create the ‘clouds’ layer in Google Earth). An example is the Himawari-8 satellite over Japan. Weather satellites are very low resolution and are mostly only useful for viewing cloud patterns and snow cover. For higher resolution, Sentinel-2 imagery is often published within a day of being captured, but requires downloading and processing to view. Landsat imagery is another option, but often takes longer to be released. To find the latest imagery use our KML files: Sentinel-2 and Landsat. We recommend only opening one at a time due to the large number of polygons in the files.

It is also possible to see live views from the International Space Station but you typically cannot see much detail of the surface of the earth.

The new browser based Google Earth continues to receive new content in the form of Voyager Tours. One recent addition is in honour of the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter book series and features a number of notable places relating to various Harry Potter films.

Platform 9 3/4 of Harry Potter fame.

Ten other Voyager tours were recently introduced in collaboration with National Geographic Society, PBS Education, HHMI Biointeractive and Mission Blue and focus on educational uses for Google Earth. One big benefit of putting Google Earth in the browser is that it is now available on Chrome Books, a special type of laptop that only runs the Chrome browser and no other native applications. They are popular in education and the absence of Google Earth on that platform was sorely missed by many.

In addition to the tours, National Geographic has put together some ideas for educators using Google Earth as a teaching tool.

We hope Google continues to encourage new content in the Voyager collection. We would actually like to see much more detailed and comprehensive content. For example, we would love to see the Explorers: Age of Encounter tour expanded to include other explorers from different dates and continents and to go into more depth for each one. We also found that it had not been thoroughly tested and at the time of writing, clicking on the PBS logo led to a broken link.

Note that the new Google Earth only runs in Google Chrome or as an app on Android.

This week Google released a new, browser based version of Google Earth. One of the first features you should check out in the new Earth is ‘Voyager’ (the ship’s wheel symbol). It consists of a number of interesting tours and resources from third party providers similar in concept to the ‘Gallery’ layer in Google Earth Classic.

Some of the tours just use placemarks to give context to content that is mostly presented in popups and videos, but others make good use of Google Earth features such as image overlays and photo-spheres. For example, Land Art From Above by DigitalGlobe uses image overlays to show DigitalGlobe imagery of various sights, some of which are not available in Google Earth imagery. Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom makes use of Street-View-like photo-spheres (that cannot be found in Street View).

We have previously looked at the work of “Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada” but this image of “Wish” never made it into Google Earth imagery.

Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom makes use of photospheres.

We hope Google publishes documentation on how to create tours of this nature and provides a mechanism for sharing them. similar to the Google Maps Gallery, that used to be a significant feature in Google Earth but whose prominence was somewhat harmed by the demise of Google Earth Engine. Google Maps Gallery can still be found based on ‘My Maps’ but the integration with Google Earth was removed in one of the recent updates to Google Earth Classic.