Google Earth Blog

Google Earth Event on July 20th in DC - Expect the Moon

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:30:00 -0500

Google sent out invitations last night to the media for an event to be held in Washington DC on July 20th - the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The event is about the "...newest addition to Google Earth". Given the list of speakers (Buzz Aldrin - Apollo 11 astronaut, NASA dignitaries, Anousheh Ansari - first private female space explorer, and Andrew Chaiken - author of "A Man on the Moon"), there can be little doubt what this is about. And, GEB definitely plans to attend the event!

In the summer of 2007, Google released an updated Google Moon - the 2D version for Google Maps. At the same time, Google announced the $30 Million Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP). When the new Google Moon released, GEB immediately speculated on how soon Google Earth would have a 3D version of the moon (see the last part of this article on the GLXP announcement). So, I'm pretty confident we'll be seeing the release of a 3D Moon mode for Google Earth. Google released a 3D Mars mode for Google Earth earlier this year. So, the moon is naturally going to be next. And, for the record, NASA has their own virtual globe application called WorldWind which has had a 3D moon mode available for several years now.

Google will surely make use of NASA Apollo mission imagery (panoramas, video, and stills - like in the 2D Google Moon), and hopefully HD video of the moon from the Japanese JAXA SELENE mission. More importantly, I'm sure we'll see some nice 3D terrain for the moon. I think it may be too early to expect imagery from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - which just started being operational two weeks ago (but, I'd be glad to be surprised).

Beastie Boys Create Google Earth Driving Game

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:17:40 -0500

The Beastie Boys have released a little game to help promote an album on their web site. The game lets you drive around a police car like a mad man using the Google Earth plugin. You can start up some Beastie Boys music in the upper right while playing the game. Use the cursor keys to drive around. Find some hills to jump in the air. (Unfortunately, at the moment the game isn't working. The developer didn't properly register his API key, so the application is temporarily disabled.) You can see what the game looks like in this video clip:

Actually, it's pretty simple to create your own game like this. The game is based on a sample application by Google called Monster Milktruck . The only difference with the Beastie Boys version is the use of the police car 3D model, and the fact you can play some of their music along with the game.

PhotoSketch Released - Make 3D Buildings from Photos

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:02:47 -0500

Back at the end of April, I mentioned the impending release of a plugin for Google SketchUp that would allow you to quickly create 3D models from photos. Yesterday I received an E-mail from Brainstorm LLC, the makers of PhotoSketch, that their plugin is now available (Windows only for now, Mac version in the works). The plugin is available as a 30-day free trial (see pricing). PhotoSketch works by letting you use a succession of overlapping photos of buildings and, using PhotoSketch and SketchUp, you can easily use the photos to derive 3D models from them. Watch this video tutorial to see how it is done:

Now, where would you get a succession of photos in a drive-by or fly-by situation I wonder? Could you perhaps use photos from Google Street View to create 3D models? Or, how about YouTube videos in a drive-by scenario? It will be interesting to see if modelers, who are avid 3D building creators at the 3D Warehouse, latch on to PhotoSketch to create buildings faster. [UPDATE: Brainstorm tells me that Street View imagery is "generally not sharp enough, nor does it necessarily have the amount of overlap and coverage *around* the building to make it useful. Another problem is that we cannot calibrate their camera because we don't have access to it. Therefore, it is not possible to correct for radial lens distortion." So, apparently you need more accurate photo data to use PhotoSketch properly.]

Snoovel - Google Earth Tour Creation and Hosting Site

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:13:03 -0500

Recently I was contacted by the makers of snoovel.com, a site dedicated to making available guided tours using Google Earth. snoovel has some really cool features allowing people to create and share guided tours. You can watch them on their site, or embed the tours on other web sites. See for example a snoovel tour of the ill-fated Air France Flight 447 .

Allowing you to accompany a Tour playback with multimedia content on the side has some advantages to showing the content in a placemark bubble. But, what I'm really impressed by is the tour creation tool snoovel has created. They call it "Tour Director". Tour Director is a web-based application which lets you produce a Tour using an interface familiar to anyone who has created movies using movie producing software. With snoovel, you can produce a tour by creating cameras, scenes, and adding multi-media content (including text, hyperlinks, photos, 3D models, and music). I haven't tried using it, but they have a video demonstration that looks very impressive. This is the kind of Tour creation tool a lot of people have been hoping for I think. Here is a screenshot:

I really like the idea of a graphical timeline to plan out a tour with screenshots of each scene. They also say you can save scenes and use them as components for future tours. You have the ability to control durations for each segment of the tour which makes it much easier to get the desired flow. One thing I found lacking in the playback interface is the ability of the user to control speed of playback. One of the features I like about Google Earth's Tour playback is the ability to speed up the playback. But, at this point snoovel doesn't let you do this. snoovel was developed in Germany, but they have an English translated version of the site. The site still has some rough edges, but shows a lot of potential.

This isn't the first site to offer geo-spatial tours like this using Google Earth. In fact, Magnalox had a touring capability back in 2005 using Google Earth or Maps. But, Magnalox hasn't yet supported the new Tours functionality. And, EarthSwoop (created by GEB and Google Earth Hacks) also let you do limited tours using the GE plugin with annotated text. And, just a couple weeks ago we saw the introduction of Places, which lets you record Tours and play them back using some fancy camera action.

But, snoovel has the most complete touring functionality I've seen so far with support for multi-media and a more sophisticated tour creation tool. Time will tell whether this tool evolves into a popular way to create guided tours. I definitely recommend having a look at snoovel if you're looking to create more sophisticated GE Tours and don't have programming skills to develop one by hand.

Help Google Earth with Survey, and other GE-related News

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:33:37 -0500

Help Google Earth with Survey - Google is conducting a short survey on Google Earth. Here's your chance to help improve the product. You can leave comments and suggestions at the bottom.
1 Million Followers - @ Google is the first Google twitter id to reach 1 million followers.
Featured Modeler - Google has announced another featured 3D modeler at their SketchUp blog. This time the lucky guy is John of Dursley, England whose main objective is to model his home town. John is a retired architect, so he brings a more educated perspective to his 3D models.
Panoramio April Photo Contest Winners - Check out the winners of the April photo contest from Panoramio. The winners get prizes of photo geotagging tools from the sponsor ATP.
Google Earth for travel - Nice article about using Google Earth to share your travels.

EarthURL Released

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:53:51 -0500

Roman Nurik is a Googler who develops tools to help developers create Google Earth applications. Recently he announced on Twitter the release of an application he's developed using the GE API which lets you easily pass a URL as a placemark. An app like this is handy for twitter which is all about passing short URLs to help add context to a message. Roman calls the app EarthURL.org. You simply use the GE Plugin to fly to a place you want to share, position the view you want (including 3D view angle), and then copy and paste the URL. Here, for example, is the Sphynx in Egypt .

EarthURL isn't the first easy GE URL targeted for Twitter (see EarthTwit), and going way back to shortly after Google Earth was released in 2005 there was the introduction of Tagzania. Tagzania allows you to mark placemarks in a concept they call "tags", and their URLs are short and easy to understand. See for example the location of the Eiffel Tower on their site, or with Google Earth . Twitter also lets you embed their tagged locations on a web page.

North Shore City, New Zealand in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:01:08 -0500

In response to yesterday's post on 3D terrain a GEB reader in New Zealand, Paul van Dinther, forwarded me an article in a local paper which describes how North Shore City shared high resolution imagery and 3D terrain data with Google for Google Earth. The data was released back in April, and is quite impressive. I spent some time this morning flying around this nice looking suburb area north of Auckland. The aerial imagery is clear and sharp at about 6cm resolution, and the terrain is very well done. You can see shoreline cliffs, roads, and even footpaths in the sides of hills in the terrain.

I've made a brief GE 5 tour of the North Shore City area showing some of the high resolution aerial imagery, 3D terrain, the navy base, and views of Auckland. Here's a screenshot from North Head (a park on a hill) with an impressive view of Auckland and Mount Victoria on the right:

Many cities around the world have started promoting themselves by giving more accurate imagery, terrain, 3D models and other data to Google for use in their mapping tools. This is an excellent example of how Google Earth is getting better in a way that is mutually beneficial to users of Google Earth, and providing economic benefit to those living there.

NASA/Japan Release Terrain Data - Google Earth's is Better

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:55:50 -0500

One of the top stories yesterday was how NASA and Japan have released the data from their ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite on the Internet - for free. What is significant about this is that the data covers 99% of the entire Earth's landmass terrain - verses 80% from the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) - which was the best previously available free public terrain data. ASTER's data is also higher resolution than SRTM which had a base resolution of 90m and at best 30m. ASTER's resolution has a base resolution of 30m, and can be higher under certain conditions (up to 7-10m - see documentation). The data released comes from over 1.3 million photos taken by the Aster satellite.

So, will Google Earth make use of this new ASTER data? The answer is: only a portion of the data. Google Earth already has terrain data in many areas that has higher resolution than the data provided by Aster (see below). However, ASTER provides data for remote locations (particularly high latitude regions) which previously wasn't readily available in these resolutions. And, Google Earth still has regions (such as remote pacific islands) which are using SRTM data (90m resolution). So, I'm sure Google will consider using the new data to improve the resolution in some regions. IF, they don't already have another source with better resolution. By the way, I asked Google about ASTER, and got the standard reply that they don't have anything to announce at this time (i.e. "no comment").

As far back as the February 2007, Google started introducing significantly higher resolution terrain. At that time they introduced 10m resolution terrain for the Swiss Alps, followed a few months later by 10m resolution terrain for the US and Canary Islands (read GEB review). In the more than two years since, Google has added millions of square kilometers of higher resolution terrain. Some of the terrain is much higher resolution. For example, the state of West Virginia has 3m resolution. Back in April of 2008, the city of Bergen, Norway got very high resolution data - which appeared to be based on LiDAR. Recently, Oslo, Norway also got very high resolution terrain data (also seemingly LiDAR) as well as 3D Buildings.

In recent months, Google has been regularly adding cities and countries with higher resolution terrain with nearly every imagery update (see for example the May 2009 update - new terrain is listed at the bottom). Google is no longer releasing details on the resolution of the data. Probably because the terrain resolution varies for each city. One drawback to higher resolution terrain is the data starts capturing things like buildings - not just the land - and it gets to be harder to tell the difference between good data and noise. But, the ability to see the terrain more accurately is well worth this risk in my opinion.

An important tip if you're interested in Google Earth's terrain data: Under the Google Earth Options is a slider called "Terrain Quality". If you push that slider to the right, you can see higher resolution terrain. A word of caution: higher quality terrain means more 3D data - which can slow down your update speeds in Google Earth. After viewing higher resolution terrain, I recommend putting the slider back to closer to the middle for every day use. If you have a faster computer with a powerful video card, you might be able to get away with a higher setting. (Read more tips about optimizing GE performance).

NASA Doing Robotic Recon with Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:10:58 -0500

NASA is conducting research from their Ames Research Center in California with a robot called "K10", located in northern Arizona, to simulate tele-operations for exploring the moon. They are using Google Earth extensively for both planning, visualization, and operations. In other words, Google Earth is a visualization tool for telepresence. NASA uses a black and white higher res image of their target area overlayed in GE (maybe the black and white makes it look more like the moon?). They look at the imagery to determine reconnaissance objectives and plan routes. They have developed a planning tool that works interactively with Google Earth (using network links and overlays) to develop and assign tasks for the robot and put placemarks and routes on the map. Then the task plans are sent to the robot. The robot sends back photos to NASA which are also placed in placemarks in Google Earth, and a track of the robots path is also updated continously. You can read more details and see more screenshots at the Robotic Recon web site. I'd like to get my hands on a sample KML file to see what it looks like. There is a large team of engineers involved in the Robotic Recon project, including folks from different NASA centers and several universities. And, the Robotic Recon blog shows lots of screenshots of Google Earth in use.

By the way, this story is particularly interesting to me because more than 15 years ago I developed similar tele-presence simulation software at NASA Johnson Space Center to visualize remote-operations over the Internet using a Silicon Graphics workstations. I developed the 3D software for the visualization parts, and the Internet client/server communications. In 1992, while at International Space University in Japan, I used a workstation to control a robot arm NASA had back in Houston over an Internet connection using a crude frame-grab camera (single-frame webcam) to verify position. This is so déjà vu! Part of the reason I was instantly attracted to Google Earth when it first came out, was its similarity to the software I had written. Full circle.

Tour de France 2009 in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:25:33 -0500

Once again, Thomas Vergouwen is the first to send GEB the complete tracks for the 2009 Tour de France for viewing in Google Earth. The organizers did not release the full details on the routes of the stages until recently, so it took longer then usual for maps to be created. The race begins this Saturday - July 4th. Thomas describes the situation and provides lots of details on each stage of the race at his web site, and he provides both Google Maps and the Google Earth file on the routes.

Viewing the Tour de France routes in Google Earth is one of my favorite examples of the power of Google Earth. With GE's 3D terrain, you can tilt your view and truly get a feeling of how challenging this race really is - even if you have never been to see it in person. Just load Thomas' file for the 2009 Tour de France in GE . Then, make sure you tilt your view I'm hoping there will be some more real-time tracking this year that will let you watch the position of some of the racers in Google Earth as they go along.

Links: Michael Jackson Neverland, Amnesty International, New Placenames, GE Outreach

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:00:13 -0500

Michael Jackson Neverland - Yesterday the King of Pop passed away. People will remember him in many ways, but mostly for his amazing musical and performance talents. Google Sightseeing recalled their post about Michael's Neverland Ranch and updated it with new information. You can see the Neverland Ranch in Google Earth here .
Amnesty International - Sri Lanka War - Thanks to some help from Stefan Geens of OgleEarth, Amnesty International has produced an excellent Google Earth file which highlights the aftermath of the Sri Lankan War. The file includes more updated aerial imagery, and many placemarks providing details to the human and physical costs to the war. Stefan has more details about the project at his blog.
New Multi-lingual Placenames - Google has proudly announced improvements to their database of populated places names. This way you can see names in the local language for places, or in the language of your choice used by Google Earth. By default, you'll see both local and your language. In the English version of Google Earth, the names are found under the "Borders and Labels" layer folder. The normal placenames in your language are under Populated Places, and the local language placenames are under Alternative Place Names. Part of the data has come from the Google Map Maker project where people anywhere can contribute map information. They even have names in unusual scripts as well - like Chinese, Arabic, etc. I love the new data, but the naming of the layers is a little strange and somewhat confusing. How about: "Local Placenames", "English Placenames" (replacing "English" with your language)? Also, I still really miss the cool feature the placenames used to have that when you clicked on the label it gave your three links to automatically search Google for that place, images from Google Images, and news from Google News. Google: please bring that back!
GE Outreach Birthday - Today is the second anniversary of Google announcing their Google Earth Outreach program (see GEB post of the 2007 announcement). I'm expecting Google will roll out a few layers today from Outreach.

New 3D Cities in Google Earth: Warsaw, Prague, Oslo, Toronto, Indianapolis

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:35:20 -0500

Google has pushed out another big update to the 3D Buildings layer for Google Earth today. The new layer includes thousands of new buildings in five cities and user models from the 3D Warehouse for many other cities around the world. The five cities with new greatly expanded coverage include: Warsaw, Prague, Oslo, Toronto, and Indianapolis. These cities have models made by techniques Google has yet to share: but is at least a semi-automated method which includes aerial photography for photo-realistic textures on the models. NOTE: Google continues to show user models for buildings which were already in the 3D Warehouse in favor of their own semi-automated system. Here's an example of the new coverage for Toronto:

And here's a YouTube video showing three of the new cities:

Google just released a similar big update to 3D Buildings about two weeks ago! Read more.

Hurricane/Cyclone Tracking with Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:48:40 -0500

One of Google Earth's most powerful features is the ability to pull in real-time information from other sites and overlay the information for visualization (thanks to the network link). Weather data is one of my favorite applications in Google Earth of this ability. Imagine pulling in the latest satellite photos, radar animations, hurricane tracking, live web cams on the ground, sea surface temperature analysis, etc. Well, you can do all that with the set of the very best weather tools for Google Earth which GEB has bundled together into this: the weather and storm tracking tools collection . Simply drag this network link into your Places folder to keep it handy. It won't take up space until you turn it on. It first loads several folders of weather tools you can explore. You may want to turn only one layer on at a time - these layers weren't designed to all be turned on at once. Although, some of the layers are complimentary (like current lightning strikes with clouds or storms turned on). Read more about the storm tracking tools.

Google has added a new Hurricane Season 2009 layer in the Weather layer folder. It also will automatically highlight current named storms. But, the tools in the collection above will take you much further if you have an interest in weather. Check out this GEB video of storm tracking (from 2007) in Google Earth:

NOTE: Many of these storm tracking tools have been around for some time. While they are still cool, I'd love to see some weather sites using the Google Earth API to full advantage. Weather data is great stuff when viewed in Google Earth.

Links: Muggers Caught, Tehran Imagery, Ocean Celebration, UNHCR Donation

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:24:49 -0500

As mentioned, I've been sailing this week, so posts have been slow coming (see first part of trip at the Tahina Expedition blog). I would have written last night, but the only WIFI near our anchorage went dead after dinner. Then today we sailed 70 miles back to our home base. Don't worrry, we'll be getting some onboard (yes, satellite, but also some other less-expensive options) Internet connectivity in a few weeks.

Muggers Caught by Street View - Many GEB readers forwarded me this story about two muggers (who happen to be twin brothers) having been caught thanks to Google's Street View imagery. A 14-year old Dutch boy was mugged just moments after a Street View car imaged the two muggers walking close behind him. The boy noticed the image in Street View 6 months after it happened and called police. Police requested and got the original image without face-blurring from Google and they recognized the assailants and arrested them. The AP story has the blurred version of the photo.
Tehran Imagery - Google released recent imagery of Tehran, Iran for Google Earth after a GeoSat satellite took the picture. This release was made quickly in response to the developing news there last week. You can view the photo here in Google Earth.
Ocean GE Celebration - Google took an opportunity to celebrate the new wealth of information available about the oceans, since Google Earth 5 was released last February, with a number of their partners recently. Watch this video of awards for the new ocean content. I just had to mention this because I just spent several days sailing on the ocean!
UNHCR Dontation - Just a follow-up to the post I made last week about the UNHCR and World Refugee Day. As promised, GEB has made a donation (via Frank Taylor) on Monday of over $100 to the UNHCR. If other bloggers accepted my Twitter challenge to do the same, I would appreciate hearing about it.

New Places Site - Record Movie Postcards in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:50:42 -0500

Just a month ago, PlanetInAction.com released a really cool Google Earth game called "Ships" - a simulator game for ships completely run with the Google Earth API in the browser plugin (read the GEB review). One of the features I was particularly impressed with was the really innovative camera modes of the simulator.

Now the author of Ships, Paul van Dinther, has just released another cool free application he calls "Places". This application leverages some of his work with cameras to produce the "next generation postcard". Instead of a static postcard photo, how about sending a dynamic 3D postcard using Google Earth? This goes way beyond just sending a placemark, and it leverages new GE technology.

Once you pick a place, you can do more than just send it along with a greeting. You can also record a flying tour of the location. Paul has created a custom "helicopter"-like camera and interface using the mouse and keyboard shortcuts that has to be tried to really appreciate. He has a drop down help card that will explain the shortcuts. You can get cinematic like motions to fly around. Not only that, but you can record your flying tour as a GE 5 Tour - the end result is a simple URL you can send someone to see your movie postcard. This is very cool! Watch a video introduction to Places:

You can also check out a couple of example postcard movies here: Grand Canyon and Mt. St. Helens

The interface has this handy gadget in the upper right that lets you expand the plugin to full "screen" view in your browser. This makes the experience much more immersive. You can easily back out by hitting the ESC key. Google should offer this "full-screen" gadget mode as a standard option for GE plugin apps.

I highly recommend trying out the custom camera/flying interface, and the easy way to generate a movie/Tour with the GE plugin. The flying tool is one of the best interfaces for flying in Google Earth I've seen to date. You could make some cool movies with this. I've already asked Paul, and he says he might be willing to create a custom Google Earth movie camera tool. If you think this would be a cool idea, you should leave him a comment.