Google Earth Blog

Links: Mandela 90, F-Secure, Departure, Fish in Arizona, 3D Cities, Japan, Maps

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:03:28 -0500

Not only some interesting GE files, but also some news buried in today's link roundup. Also, I will be somewhat distracted during the next month due to some travel, my two daughters starting college next month, and a big project I'm working on (which I'll be posting about here soon - well, within a couple of months). I still expect to be posting, but I may not catch everything. Thankfully, Stefan at OgleEarth is posting again, so keep an eye on him if you find I'm not posting at the usual levels for the next few weeks.

Mandela 90 - Nelson Mandela turns 90 today. Tinus of VirtualAfrica has posted a Google Earth file that shows important locations in Mandela's life. Most of the placemarks contain panoramic photos of each location.
F-Secure - F-Secure analyzes and monitors viruses, spam, and hacking activity on the Internet. They use Google Earth to visualize the spread of the viral computer activity in real-time at their operations center. They have released a KML file that lets you see a sample of their data showing the location spamming servers, computers broadcasting various viruses, and other malicious activity. The file has the IP addresses and other identifying information stripped for security reasons. I recommend watching the video they've released which explains how the real-time Google Earth data is used, and what it means.
Departure - One of the developers who joined Keyhole in 2003 and came over to Google when they bought Keyhole and built Google Earth has decided to leave Google. Apparently he felt Google has changed now that it is a much larger company. You can read his thoughts at his blog (along with some interesting tidbits about Keyhole/Google Earth), and here is a CNET story on his departure. I guess someone leaving from Google in today's economy is pretty big news.
Fish in Arizona - The Arizona Game and Fish department has created maps documenting the best boating and fishing locations. You can also view each of the Maps in Google Earth (link above each map) and get a 3D perspective on the terrain. Plus, with GE you can turn on layers like the Geographic Web (use the Panoramio photos to see what each location looks like), Places of Interest and many others to become an expert on what's available before you go there.
3D Cities - Google's Cities in 3D program bears some more fruit this week. Google has published several new cities in Google Earth which participated in the program. Turn on the 3D Buildings layer and visit some of the new cities (well, some are towns): Amherst, MA; Greenville, SC; McMinville, TN; Nanaimo, British Columbia; Nashville, TN; Washington, DC; and Jamestown, NY (not yet in the layer). Also, Google published a post on their blog where the GIS folks in Washington explain why they chose to participate in the program.
Japan - Last week, Google slipped in a new tourism layer for Japan. The layer is found under: Gallery->Travel and Tourism->Japan Tourism.
Maps - In the online mapping technology - Where 2.0 - world there is a growing camp of folks who believe mapping data should be free. Since GPSes are becoming commonplace, and technologies for mapping are becoming easier to use, folks have been banding together and creating their own map data. The OpenStreetMap folks are the premiere example. Much of the mapping data in Google Earth has been licensed from commercial sources, but Google began over a year ago to collect and publish map data for places where no commercial source existed. At this point, Google is only allowing people to view that data for free on their mapping tools. Brady Forest of O'Reilly writes an excellent post summarizing the situation after talking to Google.

Radiohead in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:10:15 -0500

On Monday the music group Radiohead released a new music video called "House of Cards". They teamed up with Google who helped them with the use of technology in the video, and through promotion on YouTube. The video uses a very creative use of LiDAR technology to show a live 3D scan of the face of the singer, Thom Yorke, and projects it in 3D while he sings. To further increase the promotion, Google created a web site to share a sample of the 3D data of RadioHead. You can view the data in a 3D viewer Google provides. And, they created a YouTube group for people to share videos of how they applied the data for other applications.

I'm not surprised to find out someone quickly took the data and imported it into 3D placemarks into Google Earth. There's no real reason to do this except that Google Earth is a great 3D visualization tool, and it's just a cool idea! The port to Google Earth was posted at the blog Swordpress. You can download it in Google Earth yourself, or you can watch this YouTube of it:

via OgleEarth.

Best Google Earth Interface Videos

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:36:59 -0500

There have been many innovative new types of computer interfaces in the last few years, and Google Earth seems to be one of the most popular apps for trying them out. We've seen everything from ping pong balls to the latest Wii Fit board used to drive Google Earth. Below is the most comprehensive collection of different interfaces demoed with Google Earth (note: I've included links to more background where available). Note that some of these demos are done with built-in interfaces or with inexpensive items you can get, or make, yourself. Read the stories for more details.

Super Touch Screen - by Perceptive Pixel (see GEB story):

Keep reading below the fold for more videos:

GIS Data for Canary Islands in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:03:10 -0500

The Canary Islands Spatial Data Infrastructure (IDE in Spanish) has released Google Earth access to some of its geographic data. Right now you can get multiple zoom levels of detail for Topographic Maps 1:5.000, Streetmaps, Vegetation Map, Land Use Map and Protected Areas Map. And, they plan to add more maps in the coming months. The maps were posted at the Google Earth Community by Jorge Rosales. You can download the Canary Islands maps here . As you zoom in, more information will be queried from their server and then drawn as an overlay in Google Earth. The default map is the topographical map. You can look under the IDECanarias folder for other maps to view. Very nice data!

I'm a big fan of seeing GIS (Geographic Information System) data like this made available to the public. Many governments have either been reluctant, or have not had the funding, to make this type of data available to the public. The data has not always been easy to convert to new formats. Recently, the top GIS software manufacturer - ESRI - has made an update to their software which makes it easier to publish GIS data in KML. Hopefully we will see a wave of useful GIS data made public in the coming months.

According to Jorge, the Canary Islands KML "...uses a server side KML to WMS translator that maps user coordinates space in standard WMS requests. Main features are: continuous user view refresh (not only on view stop), works fine with high tilt camera angles (standard GE WMS support don’t work propertly), use Canary Islands SDI cache technology for fast response, multilanguage support (Spanish/English) and legend access (via standard WMS legend support)."

Urban Art Ultimate Goal: Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:40:45 -0500

Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has done a couple of interesting large outdoor "urban art" projects. The first is a "Blue Road". He painted 1000 meters of road in bright blue in Drachten, The Netherlands - on top was the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters. The road was painted (using 4000 liters of paint) in April of 2007, and Hofstra hoped it would show up in Google Earth - but, the imagery for Drachten in GE is still dated 2005 currently (no new aerial or satellite photo has been acquired by Google for the area). I did notice the artist had some aerial photos taken of the road. I've placed one of the photos in a Photo Overlay for Google Earth - load this file and double click on the placemark to be flown into the Photo Overlay where you can see how closely the photo of the Blue Road matches the road in Google Earth. Try the transparency slider to check the underlying imagery.

More recently, in May of 2008, Henk Hofstra has done another outdoor art project called "Art-Eggcident". In this case he has created 100 foot wide fried eggs in a large square in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Some of the eggs even have 3D yolks kids can crawl on (see more photos). Amazingly, the city is allowing the art project to stay in place for the next 6 months. We can hope a proper orthographic aerial photo (straight down), or a satellite photo will capture this cool looking art project so it can be seen in the Google Earth images. But, in the meantime, I have again taken one of the aerial photos and made a Photo Overlay so you can see a photo of the Art Eggcident in its actual location in Google Earth.

This is just a reminder that if you do some large outdoor project you want to be visible in Google Earth. You can always take your own aerial photo and place it with the Photo Overlay or Image Overlay tools in Google Earth. That way it is still "immortalized".

July 2008 Imagery Update for Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:54:20 -0500

I've started getting reports of new imagery available in Google Earth today! The update is occurring as I write this because not everyone is seeing the new images yet, but it will probably be fully deployed within a few hours. Here are a few places I've confirmed (I will update this list as people tell me about other places - leave comments below please):

[UPDATED 1130, 1143, 1150, 1410, 2220 EDT - Thanks to all the input from GEB readers around the world!]

[UPDATED July 15: Wow, looks like GEB readers got it right. Check out the official details on this imagery update from Google (a pretty close match to our list - actually, ours is a little more informative).]

Catalonia/Spain - My story about 3D Roses is a popular story right now, and that's where people first started reporting the new imagery. The entire Catalonia area has new imagery mostly dated September 2006 by the Institut Cartográfic de Catalunya. Also, Murcia, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada, Cuenca and Cáceres (see comment below). Also, Valencia. Also: Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona
Portugal - Looks like areas in Portugal have new imagery.
Czech Republic - entire country has Spot Image (medium resolution 2.5 meter)
Slovakia - entire country with Spot Image
Hungary - entire country with Spot Image
Croatia - Notheastern part
Australia - All of western Australia has Spot Image as well! Also, some new low resolution imagery for the Great Barrier Reef area off North Eastern Australia (see dark colored imagery). Adelaide, Brisbane, Tasmania
USA - Looks like all of New Mexico has high resolution now. Credits to NMR GIS dated July 2005.
Mexico - Central Mexico has Spot Image imagery
Italy - Rome, Naples
Venezuela - Maracaibo (Thanks Gerardo!)
Germany - center of Munich
Canada - Quebec, Southern Ottawa
California - Areas around San Francisco, San Diego, Benicia, Solano County, Monterey, Palo Alto, Los Angeles (unconfirmed)
England - Bristol, Worcester, Evesham
Cote d'lvoire - Bouaké

You can confirm whether the imagery is new by clicking on the "View in Google Maps" icon in GE - the imagery in Google Maps isn't showing the new data yet. If you find new areas not in my list above, please leave a comment and I'll update the list.

New Google Earth 4.3 (beta) Available - Version 4.3.7284.3916

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:46:17 -0500

There's a new version of Google Earth 4.3 (beta) available. This release does not appear to introduce new features, but it does address a number of issues some of you have encountered with GE 4.3 which was released in April. Since Google has had a couple of months, I'm expecting this version to be a more stable version to use. ~~I'm still waiting for an official report and release notes, and will add the details here when they are available.~~ See the official release notes for this update below. There's a lot of fixes to a variety of problems - many that only applied to certain OSes, or system configurations. Head on over to the official Google Earth Download page to get the latest (the "Check for Update" currently won't find this new release.)

See the initial review of Google Earth 4.3 for reasons why you should get the new version if you are still running an older version of Google Earth. Or, check out the GEB video demo of GE 4.3:

Links: Japan Tourism, GE Tutorial, GoogleSightseeing

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:21:03 -0500

New Japan Tourism Layer - Google has released a new Japan Tourism layer for Google Earth. The layer can be found under Gallery->Travel and Tourism->Japan Tourism. Placemarks will appear as you zoom over Japan with information on popular tourism sites.
GE Tutorial - Richard Treves, who writes the Google Earth Design blog, has released a new Google Earth tutorial (he's done others in the past). Richard produces content and educational tools related to Google Earth as part of the University of Southhampton - School of Geography.
GoogleSightseeing Adds Languages - The excellent GoogleSightseeing.com site, which shares unique locations visible in Google Earth/Maps and adds some creative interpretation or amusing perspectives. They have added new versions of their site in 3 additional languages bringing the total to 6 (English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, and French).

More Bad News on Coral Reefs - NOAA's Google Earth Data

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:15:41 -0500

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released an important report of the state of coral reefs in US waters. The report was released at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale this week. And, the news is bad: "Almost half the coral reef ecosystems in United States territory are in poor or fair condition, mostly because of rising ocean temperatures." says the report. Timothy Keeney, NOAA's deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere, presented the results and said: "If we lose the reefs, you lose a very significant and important habitat." Twenty-five percent of all marine species need coral reefs to live and grow, while 40 percent of the fish caught commercially use reefs to breed. via CNN. And, here is an AP video report on the news:

These are serious issues. As a scuba diver, fisherman, and sailor, I've been very concerned about the state of coral reefs for many years. I've mentioned previously that NOAA has a web site called Coral Reef Watch dedicated to the issues of coral reefs. The site contains a coral reef network link which provides updated NOAA information on reefs in US waters and important data such as sea surface temperature for the world's oceans. They updated the network link earlier this year.

Another useful coral reef dataset is maintained at ReefBase.org. They have a huge database and maps showing the conditions of reefs world-wide. GEB reported two years ago how someone had converted the data for viewing coral reefs in Google Earth. But, the data is now out of date. I'm surprised Reefbase hasn't converted to Google Earth for themselves - after all, many more people would be likely to see it if they released it for Google Earth and Maps. (The new Finder! service might be a good place to copy over the Reefbase data so it can be viewed in more popular mapping tools.) There is also an organization dedicated to collecting data on coral reefs by helping train anyone who goes near reefs to help monitor the health of the reefs: ReefCheck.org.

Roses First 3D City in Spain for Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:40:01 -0500

(En Español)

Roses is the first city in Spain to get their entire city in 3D for Google Earth. The models are currently the basic gray buildings without textures. But, they are part of the Google Earth 3D Buildings layer. Just search for "Roses, Spain" to see for yourself. Google has a program called Cities in 3D (read more) to help city planners provide Google with data so their cities can be included in the layer. The program was just expanded to several European countries (including Spain) in early June. According to GEB reader Albert Garcia, they are also working to add SketchUp models with photo-textures for Roses.

Google has dozens of cities now where a large percentage of the urban area is modeled in 3D (more in the US than any other country at the moment). Here is a list of some cities in Europe where most of the city is in 3D: Zurich, Munich, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Westport in Ireland. Berlin also has a huge 3D collection they created themselves, but it's not part of the built-in GE layer. Similarly, Dresden in Germany also did their own layer which is not yet part of the built-in layer. And, let's not forget, probably the most 3D data available for any country is in Japan. Nearly every structure for several major cities is rendered if you turn on the 3D Buildings layer and visit cities in Japan.

Winners of Model Your Campus Contest in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:23:17 -0500

Google has announced the winners of the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition. They named 9 campus winners this year (last year's contest had 7 campus winners - see video). The winning campuses are listed below - but, download this file to fly to each campus and see the 3D buildings):

Johns Hopkins University (Student Technology Services & Digital Media Center; United States)
Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (China)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (Department of Engineering; United States)
Missouri University of Science and Technology >(Department of Physical Facilities; United States)
Nicolas Copernicus University (Department of Biology and Earth Sciences; Poland)
Stockholm University and KTH (Department of Computer and Systems Sciences; Sweden)
Cardiff University (Department of Information Services; United Kingdom)
Bournemouth University (The Business School; United Kingdom)
Peking University (School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science; China)

NOTE: at some point, I'm sure Google will include most of the models in the 3D Buildings layer. But, they aren't there yet. Load the file above to see the models.

Google doesn't say how many entries there were for the contest, but the 3D Warehouse collection shows 95 different collections of partial or completed works. Congratulations to all the winners! Those of you who started and didn't finish should just wait for another contest. I'm sure Google will do something again next year.

New WebCams Layer for Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:17:01 -0500

Back on the 1st of June, I mentioned and shared a new KMLd collection by Webcams.travel showing 4500 web cams around the world as placemarks in Google Earth. This morning, I noticed the layer has been incorporated into Google Earth. You'll see it in the Geographic Web->Preview layer. Or, you can look for it under Gallery->Webcams.travel. Open up the oval-shaped placemarks to see the current webcam view for that location. See the example in the screenshot of the beach at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Webcams.travel collection is certainly the largest collection of webcams I've seen in Google Earth. However, be aware that the placemarks are user-generated. Many of the webcam placements are inaccurate (e.g. I found two placemarks of Guadaloupe that are actually webcams for St. Barts, and several other wrong labels or placements in other Caribbean islands).

There have been many other smaller placemark collections showing webcams. Here are a few written about here at GEB:

Cruise ship positions and webcams - one of my favorites because the webcams move around
Everything you wanted to know about Thailand
Hurricane Tracker - This automatic tracker shows all the current storms globally, and also shows placemarks to nearby webcams to each storm.

Google Introduces Lively Virtual World

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:32:20 -0500

Yesterday, Google let loose their newest beta product: Lively. Lively is a 3D virtual world social networking site similar in some ways to Second Life. This was first rumored to be in the works last September (see some of my thoughts on the rumor). With Lively you have to install a plugin and a separate 3D application (currently only on Windows - and it supports only IE and Firefox). It doesn't surprise me the application is not based on Google Earth. Lively is intended to allow you to enter fantasy worlds. Google Earth is intended to mirror the real world. Lively has a more cartoon-like feel which is intended to be fun and unreal - and Lively is intended to allow you to interact socially with other people over the Internet. Here's their introductory video:

On the surface, the biggest difference compared to Second Life is that instead of a single connected virtual world, you instead get a multitude of small "rooms" which anyone can set up themselves. You can create your own avatars, and dress them up with different outfits. You can also make your own rooms and add objects to them. You have controls for moving your avatar around and lots of animated actions (complete with sounds) letting you "clap", "bow", "sit", "dance", "kick", "hug", "kiss", etc. And, of course you can chat with other people in the room. This is a new application, so they haven't yet introduced APIs and scripts so you can create your own clothing and animations. But, you can expect that to happen as it evolves.

I do see a need to map locations for rooms to help people understand the locality of people who might be in the room. Some of the rooms have context of location, and then there's the issue of people speaking different languages in a room. In fact, Keir Clark at GoogleMapsMania has already produced a Google Maps mashup called Lively Map with placemarks of a few rooms. With Google Maps you can actually open a Lively room inside the placemark windows. Unfortunately, the Lively embed feature requires an <iframe> which means you can't open one in a Google Earth placemark. [UPDATE: Actually, it's probably a good thing as you shouldn't keep Google Earth open at the same time you're running Lively since they both require lots of memory (both OS and Graphics memory).] I've created a couple of Google Earth placemarks where you can at least see the locations of Lively rooms and enter them.

If you are into 3D virtual worlds, you should definitely give Lively a try. You have to have a Google account to set it up and use it. But, you can change your "name" in the worlds to whatever you want. I was surprised to find someone had already taken "Gearthblog" when I went to use it. Identity theft already? There's also a lot of kissing, kicking and hitting going on. But, hey, that's nothing new.

I wonder if Lively would support SketchUp files?

Links: Earth API Explained, Tour of 3D, Geography Lesson Plan, How NIN KML Was Done

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:38:12 -0500

Earth API Explained - During the Google I/O Conference last month, Google introduced the new Earth API and plugin. First, there was a talk by Michael Jones - see video - during the last half he introduced the new Earth API and plugin. There was another very important talk at Google I/O by Paul Rademacher - the guy who hacked the first Google Maps mashup called Housing Maps, and now works at Google. Paul is the guy who led the development effort for the Earth API. During his talk, he describe the thinking behind the API and how to use it. Thanks to a tip from Mike Pegg, I can now share Paul's talk (1 hour):
Tour of 3D - An interesting addition at the Google 3D Warehouse. Google now has an Earth API version of their dynamic map showing the most recent, popular and highly rated 3D models at the Warehouse. It's sort of a Twittervision for geo-located 3D models. Thanks to GEB reader Jan Wesbuer for the tip! By the way, they should also offer a version that lets you zoom in and see buildings added to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth.
Geography Lesson Plan - Richard Treves of the University of Southampton School of Geography has published a lesson plan which makes use of Google Earth to illustrate its points. You can download the PDF instructions of the plan, but I encourage you to read his post first which also includes links to KML files. Richard's Google Earth Design blog is intended to help people think about the best ways to design KML and Google Earth presentations. Definitely worth reading if you are thinking about using Google Earth for educational lessons.
How NIN KML Was Done - The guys who developed the Nine Inch Nails visualization I wrote about last week, also got to do a guest post on Google's new Geo Developer Blog talking about how they developed their new creation.

Nice Range Map for Important Animals in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:57:24 -0500

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation has developed a nice set of KML files which illustrate the range for a variety of both land and marine animals who are of "conservation concern". Check out the file in GE here . I really like the way they have used the folders in the KML file to select different species and the colored polygons to represent the ranges of each species. And, the same file is also available in Spanish and French .

Here's a brief description from their file:

The North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) developed this map layer to provide range maps and basic information about the North American Species of Common Conservation Concern. These terrestrial and marine species depend on regional action in Canada, Mexico, and the United States for their continued survival and success. Maps for terrestrial species are based on range maps compiled by NatureServe.

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is an international organization created by Canada, Mexico and the United States under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation to address regional environmental concerns, help prevent potential trade and environmental conflicts, and to promote the effective enforcement of environmental law. The Agreement complements the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Thanks to a tip from GEB reader Tommy.