Google Earth Blog

New 3D cities released: Valencia, Spain and Oklahoma City

Google Earth Blog — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:02:08 -0500

Google has just pushed out their weekly 3D building release, and the two new cities this week are Valencia, Spain and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Google has released a nice video fly-through of Valencia, which you can see here:

In addition, they've offered up some neat sights to see in the city:

City of Arts and Sciences (KMZ)
Plaza de Toros (KMZ)
Saint Mary of Valencia Cathedral (KMZ)

Find any other cool sights in either city? Tell us in the comments!

Tahina Expedition Departing Soon

Google Earth Blog — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:09:24 -0500

In a matter of hours - as early as tomorrow evening - my wife and I will be departing on a five year sailing circumnavigation called the Tahina Expedition. I've mentioned the trip on Google Earth Blog several times (for example: here and here) because we are using my favorite application a great deal on the trip. For planning the trip, documenting our route, displaying our track as we travel, displaying our photos, and even contributing content which Google will share with everyone. Not only that, but we just announced today that National Geographic will be following our trip and using our content on their ocean-related sites.

Here's a couple of interesting Google Earth related projects we will be conducting on the Tahina Expedition:

Kite Aerial Photography - I've got a camera rig that flies from a kite so we can take very high resolution aerial photos. The photos will be processed and sent back to Google so they can include them in the base imagery of Google Earth. See the first example in the post linked here.
360 Panoramas - We will also be taking 360 degree panoramas which will be put into Google Earth through the 360Cities.net layer. See the first test example of a photo taken a couple of days ago of Tahina.
3D Tahina - for fun, look at a 3D tour of our boat Tahina with the Google Earth plugin.

Make sure you book mark the Tahina Expedition site, and include our blog in your RSS reader. You'll be able to follow along on our five year trip and see all kinds of interesting photos, videos, and Google Earth content. There will also be a layer in Google Earth showing our travels (that will be announced soon).

How to use StreetView in Google Earth

Google Earth Blog — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:03:10 -0500

It's a subject we've discussed before, but it's worth taking another look. With all of the great new StreetView imagery arriving the last week, many people don't realize how easy it is to view that imagery in Google Earth. If you find yourself in Google Earth using one of the many layers they've built in or exploring a KML file you recently downloaded, it can be handy to dive into StreetView mode without having to load your browser and use Google Maps.

This brief video gives you an overview of how it's done:

If you prefer text-based instructions, here is a short explanation of how it's done:

The first thing you'll need to do is look for the Street View layer on the lower left of Google Earth and turn it on by clicking the little box to the left. Then look for the gold camera icons as you zoom into a street location of interest. If you single-click the left mouse button on a Street View camera icon, you get a placemark that shows the photo. Click the link there to enter the Street View image. Or, double-click to fly straight in.

Street View in Google Earth uses the special Photo Viewer tool which lets you pan around the inside of a 3D projected photo. Street View images are spherical panoramas allowing you to look around 360 degrees side-to-side and up-down. You can even see the spherical Street View photos as you zoom in close over a street. With Google Earth, you can adjust the transparency of the images and compare the background 3D terrain or 3D buildings (if available) and see that the Street View photos match the surrounding area. You can also turn on other layers such as the Geographic Web (including photos), Roads, Dining, Lodging, etc. to get more information on an area.

There are literally millions of StreetView images in Google Earth, with more being added all the time. Have fun browsing around and see what you can find. If you'd like some fun StreetView items to browse, check out StreetViewFun.com or the Google Earth Hacks StreetView section. If you use the GEH collection, look for the "View in Google Earth" button to be flown directly to that item in Google Earth, as seen in the screenshot below.

If you know of other interesting collections of StreetView sights, leave a comment and let us know.

Links: Full list of StreetView updates, TeachMideast.org, CyberCity 3D partners with HomeGain

Google Earth Blog — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:02:17 -0500

Full list of StreetView updates We told you a few days ago about some large amounts of new data for StreetView. As time passed, Google slowly revealed more and more coverage. Along with the already covered Mexico, Netherlands and Hawaii, Google has released details about the new imagery in Spain, and it's been confirmed that new imagery has been added to various locations in the United States and has finally come to the Canary Islands.

Google Maps Mania showcases some of the best views in each area: Spain | Hawaii | Netherlands | Mexico

TeachMideast.org Launches Teach Mideast has just launched, and it provides a ton of free K-12 resources that cover the Middle East, Islam and Muslim societies. It uses an embedded map on the site to showcase their data, and gives a quick "View in Google Earth" link to allow you to go deeper. For teachers that cover that part of the world (history, geography, etc), this could be an excellent resource.

CyberCity 3D parters with HomeGain While I still think that ultimately we'll all be able to easily model our own homes using something like Building Maker, it'll be quite a while before that's available in a wide enough area. Until then, it's neat to see the growing competition between various "home modeling" companies as they fight for real estate business. The big winner in all of this is us, in the form of a more informative (and fun!) house-hunting search.

CC3D launched their "Virtual Viewing" product a few months ago, and now they've teamed up with HomeGain.com to showcase some of those renderings on their site. I'm disappointed it's not an embedded model, but it's still nice to see at least some level of integration. Here's a sample page where you can click on some of the "View in 3D" buttons.

Concept3D does some similar work (as we discussed last month), but they don't have any direct ties to real estate companies that we're aware of.

Here's a screenshot of how the CyberCity3D/HomeGain integration works.

New StreetView imagery in Mexico, Netherlands, Hawaii

Google Earth Blog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:30:56 -0500

Google has just released StreetView imagery for a variety of locations in Mexico, the Netherlands and Hawaii, and has vastly increased the amount of imagery available in Spain.

The new cities in Mexico include Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta , Playa del Carmen, Cozumel and Cancun.

Near Cancun, Mexico

The new cities in the Netherlands include Utrecht, Den Haag, Eindhoven, Den Bosch, Tilburg and Leeuwarden.

Utrecht, Netherlands

Hawaii now has StreetView imagery for the first time, according to the Official Google Blog. It appears that other states have seen some expanded and/or refreshed imagery as well, but we can't verify that yet.

Waialua, Hawaii

It also appears that some Spain has received a lot more imagery.

If you see anything else that's been updated, please let us know in the comments below. If you find anything cool, be sure to add it to the Google Earth Hacks Streetview section.

Track Hurricane Ida in Google Earth

Google Earth Blog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:55:52 -0500

Hurricane Ida is on a path for the central Gulf Coast, expected to make landfall tonight somewhere between New Orleans and Pensacola. While the storm is expected to weaken before it hits land, it will still arrive as a strong tropical storm and could cause quite a lot of damage.

As you know, Google Earth has some excellent tools for tracking storms like this. You can overlay weather satellite photos, radar, storm tracks, real-time lightning strikes, pressure maps, wind maps, sea surface temperatures, and more. We've written about many of the tools available in the past. Here is a set of weather tools in a single network link that lets you get access to great weather data in one convenient package. Check out the many datasets starting with two different storm tracking tools. You can also read more details about the collection.

To help you understand what's possible with these weather tools, here is a video demonstration that Frank created a few years ago:

There's also an excellent new tool available for Google Earth which lets you follow the hurricane hunters as they fly into the storms and collect data. Check out the story about live hurricane hunter mission data.

MS Oasis of the Seas heading for Florida

Google Earth Blog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:37:21 -0500

The largest cruise ship in the world, the MS Oasis of the Seas, is on a journey from Finland to Fort Lauderdale, FL. She's expected to arrive in Florida this week, with her maiden voyage from Miami scheduled for December 1.

A user named 'sladys' over at Google Earth Hacks has posted a KML file to see the journey of the ship. In addition, 'Naruto_fan' has modeled the Oasis of the Seas, along with her soon-to-be sister Allure of the Seas, in the Google 3D Warehouse.

The ship has already had quite an adventure. On November 1, she had to pass under the Great Belt Fixed Link bridge in Denmark. The bridge has a clearance of 213ft above the water, but the ship has a height of 236ft. This obviously posed a problem. By lowering it's telescoping smokestacks, waiting until low tide, and using a full thrust, the ship was able to squeeze under the bridge with about two feet to spare! Check out the video below to see it happen:

Links: Milwaukee and Indianpolis 3D buildings, Fraps 3.0 released

Google Earth Blog — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:13:44 -0500

New 3D Buildings in Milwaukee and Indianapolis: Google continues to add more 3D buildings to Google, having just released Milwaukee, WI and Indianapolis, IN, along with thousands of user-generated buildings. As with past releases, I would expect that most of the user-generated buildings were from people using the Building Maker tool. (via @3DWH)

Fraps Version 3.0 Released: Fraps is a Windows-only program that allows you to easily grab video from almost any program that uses DirectX or OpenGL, including Google Earth. We've used it before to show off things like Disney in 3D and it does a great job.

Today they've released version 3.0 with a few significant improvements. In particular, it now supports DirectX 11 and Windows 7, two essential technologies that this kind of software needs to support. I've tried out the new version and it runs as well as the previous ones. For $37, it's a steal. Even better, you can try it out for free (with a watermark added to the video) to see how well it'll work for you.

I personally use Jing for a lot of screen capture sessions, but for getting video imagery directly from Google Earth, Fraps can capture at a much better frame rate.

New Historical Imagery Added

Google Earth Blog — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:54:48 -0500

One of the really neat features introduced in Google Earth 5 is the historical imagery slider. Using this tool, you can view old imagery and compare it to more recent imagery for a particular location.

Over the past year, we've seen some neat examples of that. Below is a video that Frank made back in February that shows how the feature works and gives a quick tour of the "Bird's Nest" stadium from the 2008 Olympics.

In March, Google added a lot more imagery to this section, which offered some neat perspective on things like Amazon deforestation. It's also allowed us to revisit neat old discoveries that were lost after subsequent imagery updates, such as this KC-135 refueling in mid-air, or over 1700 items on Google Earth Hacks that are "outdated" but can still be seen using this tool.

Today, Google has added more historical imagery including some for Berlin, Germany beween 1945 and 1953. It's neat to be able to go back and see how a city has changed over the years, especially when you can span more than half a century between two images.

Check it out, and be sure to let us know if you find any other interesting historical imagery out there.

New community for Builder Makers

Google Earth Blog — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:00:34 -0500

In an effort to help Builder Maker users connect with each other, Google has just unveiled their new Building Maker community. This community is aimed at users who model 3D buildings, whether they use SketchUp or they simply use the Building Maker tool.

Their goal is to have a place for people to share tips, tricks and other support for these tools. If you have questions about Building Maker, or need help solving a problem with it, this new community would be a good place to start. In addition, they're hoping that people will communicate with each other so they don't duplicate the same buildings. While it's a good idea, it still needs more work.

A community message board is simply not the best way to check to see who is working on a particular building -- it'll be chaos. Instead, they need to show markers on the map to indicate which buildings are being worked on or have recently been completed. Using different colors, they could show buildings:

-- Under construction by a fellow Builder
-- Completed by a fellow builder and waiting approval by Google
-- Completed by a fellow builder but denied by Google
-- Already 3D in Google Earth

By doing that it'd be very easy to tell what buildings you should avoid wasting your time on. They already show markers for other buildings that you have built (see image below), so why not show markers for buildings submitted by other users? I would expect a feature like this to be implemented eventually.

Markers showing buildings I've done in Atlanta

Also, Google will probably be releasing their latest set of 3D buildings to Google Earth sometime today or tomorrow, so we'll keep you posted on that. They'll likely announce it on their Twitter account, but if you see any new buildings start to pop up, please let us know.

The best finds in the new imagery

Google Earth Blog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:48:38 -0500

As part of Google's imagery release yesterday, they encouraged users to Tweet about neat locations that they found in the new imagery by using the #GEarthIMG hash tag. Here are some of the best that we've seen come through so far:

Historic planes in Sacramento (from Spathiinc)

Sunken ship and pier (from @Mpegg)

Turkmenistan's "Door to Hell" (more info | from @gsightseeing)

A person feeding Sea Lions in Santa Cruz (from Spathiinc)

If you find any other cool stuff in the new imagery, Tweet it out using the #GEarthIMG hash tag or simply leave a comment below and tell us about it.

New Google Earth Imagery - November 3

Google Earth Blog — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:05:42 -0500

Sharp-eyed reader 'RiderLT' has discovered some fresh imagery in Google Earth, which we've been able to confirm. If you look in central Kazakhstan (earth - maps) you'll see that there is clearly new imagery in the area. Remember, you can compare the imagery in Google Earth to the imagery in Google Maps to determine if an area has been updated. As with previous updates, the new imagery is visible in Google Earth but is not yet visible in Google Maps.

What else can you find that's been updated?

[UPDATE -- 03-Nov, 6:01pm EST]
Google has released the official list of updates. You can view it using the Google Earth Plug-in on their site, or download the KML to see all of the updates inside of Google Earth.

Brazil -- Especially south and southeast parts of the country (thanks 'Tiago')
Kazakhstan -- Most of the country (thanks 'RiderLT')
New Zealand -- Waikato, mostly north of Hamilton (thanks 'Erik')

Links: Seero for sale, i-gotU GPS logger review, Best of Building Maker expands

Google Earth Blog — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:16:24 -0500

Seero For Sale: We've talked about Seero a few times in the past. They offer live video with GPS and did some cool stuff with Where 2.0 2008. Recently, the Seero team decided to sell the site (eBay auction) and all assets so they can focus on other projects. The site would be a serious investment, with a starting bid close to $50K. A good example of Seero's capability can be seen in this Steve McQueen video.

i-gotU GPS: The folks at @trip have a nifty new GPS device to help you put your activity into Google Earth. I've been playing with it for a few days and I tend to agree with them -- it's a great little device. It's tiny, waterproof and can be used for 80 hours non-stop; quite impressive!

The only big problem I had with it is that it's not very compatible with Windows 7. My primary desktop and my primary laptop are Windows 7, and my netbook doesn't have a CD drive. That meant I had to dig out my old XP laptop and fire it up. To their credit, it worked reasonably well on there. However, they need to solve the insane Windows 7 directions as quickly as possible. As neat as the device is, having to boot Windows in a special manner each time just to use the device is a bit too much. Also, there is no Mac version of the software available; they simply recommend Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

If you have a computer that can handle it, the cost isn't too bad (under $100 for both models) and would probably be excellent if you do a lot of travel and/or hiking. I'll keep an eye on it and let you know when they finally release decent software for Windows 7 and/or Mac. In the meantime, I'd hold off on this purchase unless you have an older Windows machine with no intention of upgrading to Win 7. Here's a short sample video from their site to show what a track looks like:

Best of Building Maker: We've mentioned this collection before, but felt it was worth showing off again. With all of the Building Maker models that are arriving in Google Earth, the Best of Building Maker collection is a great way to see some of the best. None of my models have made it in there -- have yours?

Caribbean 1500 Rally using Google Earth once again

Google Earth Blog — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:53:10 -0500

As they have in years past, the Caribbean 1500 Sailing Rally is doing some cool stuff with Google Earth to help showcase their event, which begins today around noon EST.

They're using Magnatrax.net to help track the position of every boat and they have a variety of boat classes that you can track -- Cruising, "Bahamas Fleet", Rally Class 1/2 and Racing Class 3/4. Choose the one you want, then click the "Google Earth" link in the lower left corner. They show the current position of each boat, but they also take advantage of the Time Slider tool to let you see past locations.

They seem to have removed some of the other folders from previous years (weather and such), but that's ok. Google Earth has some nice built-in weather data, which you can easily use alongside of the race data. That's really the power of Google Earth -- being able to combine data from a variety of sources to help get the most information at one time.

The race begins later today, so keep an eye on it in Google Earth to see who wins.

Happy Halloween! Turn Google Earth into a giant pumpkin

Google Earth Blog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:26:14 -0500

A few years ago, Frank Taylor made a cool pumpkin overlay for Google Earth. It's still a fun toy to play with, so we're showing it off again. To make it work, simply download the KML here and that's it!

For maximum benefit, turn off the atmosphere ("View -> Atmosphere") and the "Borders & Labels" (found in the "Layers" on the left side of your Google Earth window).

The pumpkin was created using a simple image overlay that he wrapped around the globe, then added a 3D model for the stem. You can read details on how that's done in his post from last year.

If you want more, you can check out a bunch of Halloween goodness in the Google 3D Warehouse or maybe check out the "Pumpkin Man" in Google StreetView, found in the Disney Resort in Paris.

Happy Halloween!