Ogle Earth

Links: Sea ice animation; Google Earth search trend; FastSatfinder

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:48:46 +0000

Daily Arctic ice animation: Ross Swick of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center writes:
The near real-time sea ice animation has made it's way through our review process and been released on our virtual globes home page. It's much improved as a result of everyone's feedback. The released version includes both sea ice concentrations and sea ice extent. We're also generating 3 files per day - 30, 60, and 90 day animations - so we can accommodate users with memory and bandwidth limitations. As before we're using network links so the updates load automatically into GE at startup.

The sea ice minimum is about six weeks away at this point and we can already see an above average amount of open water in the Arctic. As usual this is imagery, not data, so standard caveats apply.
It's definitely worth checking out the 90-day version if you can and then, when all the images have downloaded, dragging the time navigation handle quickly to and fro. The result is quite beautiful.

Developing countries heart Google Earth: Jonathan Thompson types "Google Earth" into the Insights for Search tool, and discovers that the highest regional interest for the search term is... in Sudan, where US export law forbids the download of Google Earth application altogether (and Google is complying). Jonathan speculates that perhaps its relative popularity is due to its unavailability there, or due to the publicity surrounding the application's default Darfur Layer.

If you look at the other countries on the top-10 list, it's remarkable that all are developing countries, seven are predominantly muslim, and six are run by authoritarian regimes (Myanmar being another case where US laws prohibit the downloading of Google Earth). What's heartening is that this list is pretty much the same as the one where widespread use of Google Earth would do the most public good.

Residents of countries where Google Earth is forbidden can of course take heart in the fact that the same imagery dataset is available via the web, without US-mandated restrictions, on Google Maps. And soon, very very soon, Google Earth will be in the browser for all — though it will be interesting to see if such a browser plugin is subject to the same export laws as the standalone version.

FastSatfinder: This Google Earth browser plugin app lets you find the direction to a long list of geostationary satellites from any location on Earth (if it's in your line of sight, duh). I can't test it on my Mac yet, but no doubt it works in a similar fashion to the previously reviewed Dishpointer. FastSatfinder also comes as a $30 Windows standalone version, with extra features that I suspect are of use mainly to the dedicated hobbyist. (Via Boxier's Weblog)

Street View, post-disaster empathy tool: In the latest update to Street View, all of New Orleans is visible, and three years on from Katrina chunks of it are still looking miserable.

View Larger Map

Are you empathising yet? Want to help? That's the idea behind Street View in New Orleans, according to Louisana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu writing on the Official Google Blog.

If it works, why not take it to the extreme — I wonder what Street View of a Darfur refugee camp in Chad might do? (Via James Fee)

Driving directions with the Google Earth API: Google Maps Mania flags a post on the Google Geo Developers Blog: "Simulating Driving Directions with the Earth API and Maps' Directions API" (direct link to app) and makes a demo video.

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Links: Street View downunder; no Olympic satellite view for China

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:37:03 +0000

Australia, Japan get Street View: Amazing — Australia is now smothered in blue Street View lines in Google Maps — including some of the most out-of-the-way places you can imagine:

View Larger Map

The Australian's take: "Privacy advocates say Google's gone too far," though not, it turns out, Australia's Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner, which thinks Google's approach is fair dinkum enough. Japan too gets some of its main cities covered. Thanks to Claudia Carvalho for the tip.

Olym-pics not for the Chinese: Google's recently updated satellite imagery of the brand-new Olympic stadiums in Beijing — which would provide ample opportunity for the Chinese to feel proud — is alas not available to ordinary Chinese, as inside the Great Chinese Firewall Google's Chinese-language Ditu Maps service does not have a satellite imagery layer at all. Because, you know, all those domestic terrorists would never dream of using a proxy server to maps.google.com.

OneGeology outputs to KML: It turns out that OneGeology, previously flagged on Ogle Earth but not tested due to browser limitations, outputs to KML, as Hypocentre points out Now that I've had access to IE7 for a bit, I can confirm that the exported view-based network link works great in Google Earth. All Points Blog also lauds the data, but comments that the site's technical underpinnings is a bit dated. As far as I'm concerned, the KML links for the regional layers serve all my needs — it would be great to offer them as a list of links on a plain-vanilla web page that don't depend on a small subset of browsers or the map view — I know where Africa is:-) Oh and a KML layer with the key would make it perfect.

3DXplorer - new Java-based virtual world: Serendipitously, just a few days after Avi Bar-Zeev clarifies the difference between two different kind of "browser-based" 3D virtual worlds/globes (one kind requires a plugin be installed, the other relies on the browser's own resources — which is a much harder feat to pull off) an avatar-driven virtual world of the second kind is announced: 3DXplorer. Tantalizingly, it supports COLLADA models of the kind made by SketchUp and found in Google 3D Warehouse. In other words, you can create your own virtual worlds on your own website, populate it with existing 3D content, and let anyone with a free 3DXplorer account visit. That could well be a winning formula, with a free hosting option for low-traffic sites and paid options that are competitive with Second Life, depending on usage patterns. It runs in java 1.6, which alas Apple has been tardy shipping as a default with OS X (it's still at 1.5). The main constraint, I suspect: It doesn't look as slick as Second Life.

Mapufacture + GeoCommons: Geoweb pioneer Mapufacture, with its early support for syndicated georeferenced content via GeoRSS, is being acquired by FortiusOne, which is democratizing access to complex GIS databases via its GeoCommons platform. As Mapufacture's Mikel Maron, Andrew Turner and FortiusOne's Sean Gorman explain it, the two services are complementary and hence a perfect fit — Sean Gorman:
The long term vision has been to eventually fuse the personal and dynamic data of the GeoWeb (long tail) [Mapufacture] with the static and statistical data of GIS (short tail) [Geocommons].
I think it's wonderful that there is consolidation afoot among the social geoentrepreneurs — there are some very big fish in the geospatial pond.

Earthmine update: O'Reilly Radar updates us on progress with Earthmine, which is working on an API to integrate its "Street View on steroids" into third party web sites. Don't know about Earthmine yet? You need to check out this video.

Landsat to go free: Announced today: 35 years of archived Landsat imagery will be made freely available on the web by the end of 2008. The U.S. Geological Survey will be hosting the data, which is good news — the USGS is an enthusiastic adopter of KML for many of its other projects. Depending on how comprehensively this dataset is integrated with Google Earth et. al., we'll soon be able to browse the Earth in time as well as in space.

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Google Sky lawsuit dismissed

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:48:09 +0000

That demonstrably frivolous lawsuit filed by Jonathan Cobb back in February 2008, alleging that Google stole the idea of Google Sky from him? Dismissed. This just arived in my feed reader via the RSS feed tracking the case:

Cobb v. Google, Inc. et al Docket Report Updated 2008-08-01

MEMORANDUM OPINION, The Court GRANTS defendant's motion to dismiss and DENIES plaintiff's motion for declaratory judgment. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)

ORDER granting defendant's Motion 43 to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction; denying plaintiff's Motion 44 for Declaratory Judgment. ORDERED that judgment is entered for defendant. SO ORDERED. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)

This case tracking page should soon be updated with that new information.

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Jerusalem - now in high resolution! (sort of)

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:08:47 +0000

For the first time since I've started looking, a high resolution satellite image of Jerusalem is available on the web. Until now, such imagery has not been available because of an inane pre-geoweb US law called the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which prohibits US satellite operators like Digital Globe from selling imagery of Israel and the Palestinian Territories at resolutions higher than what is commercially available in the rest of the world (currently 2m per pixel). I've ranted about Kyl-Bingaman before.

Imagine my pleasant surprise to find Chris Pendleton blogging a new service by TerraPixel that lets you "patch" bits of Microsoft Virtual Earth where the imagery might be low-resolution of old, replacing it with your own imagery, or imagery provided by TerraPixel.

Chris points to TerraPixel's demo, and specifically to the "Holy Patch" sample, which overlays a high resolution map of Jerusalem's old city over Virtual Earth's pixellated base layer (courtesy of Messrs. Kyl and Bingaman). Wonderful!

Interestingly, the image has some metadata stamped right on it:

That seems to point to an acquisition date of 1998 (alas Hebrew is not a script I've mustered), though this would jar with TerraPixel's own description of the patch:

Also, I'm not so sure the high resolution imagery is 6 inches per per pixel. I'm guessing it's more like 50cm per pixel.

Still, now that such imagery is in the wild, here's hoping that this officially makes the Kyl-Bingaman amendment moot and that we can soon all enjoy high resolution shots of Ceasarea, Armageddon, Askelon, Masada, Bet She'an and Jericho.

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Street View and privacy - what's up with the Europeans?

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:53:35 +0000

What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? Sure, Google does not have the legal right to drive on private roads and photograph from there, as it appears to have done on two documented occasions in the US. That is a clear-cut case. In Europe, however, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it.

British tabloids are the worst offenders when it comes to tendentious reporting. For example, This is London's article is titled "Big Brother: The Google cars that will photograph EVERY front door in Britain", and contains the ridiculous

Critics say the site can be used by burglars planning escape routes from homes and by terrorists looking for military bases. The site has even been used by teenagers arranging unauthorised swimming parties in unoccupied homes.

I love the "even", as if terrorism is bad enough, but unauthorised swimming parties are beyond the pale.

The Liverpool Daily Post titled its article "Google Street View comes to Liverpool amid privacy fears" though without finding any civilians expressing said fears. The Mail on Sunday, today: Google 'burglar's charter' street cameras given the all clear by privacy watchdog The BBC has a proper neutral take: Google Street View gets go ahead.

(None of the tabloids, of course, have picked up on the irony that their paparazzi constantly flout the privacy of their "marks" out in the public space, pictures of which they then sell to an eager readership now being urged to defend its right to privacy.)

German media too is hunting for privacy officials that are complaining, even if, as Bloomberg reports, "federal and state data-protection agents have yet to find a legal basis to hinder filming that's carried out by cameras mounted on vehicles."

"From a privacy viewpoint, we don't welcome this activity,'' Federal Commission spokesman Dietmar Mueller said in an interview today. "Yet we have no legal instance to challenge it -- anyone can walk along a street with a camera.''

What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don't like it anyway.

The right to privacy of an individual is not a absolute right — as by necessity it constrains the freedom of other individuals to document and record their surroundings. As a sometime photographer and journalist myself, I believe there should not be any expectations of privacy in public places (as opposed to private spaces and inside homes, though not in front of windows visible from public spaces). If you're going to Disney World on a sick day or to a sleazy club instead of bowling, and I or Google accidentally take a snapshot of you and post it to Flickr or Street View, then that should be the end of it. The truth is out there — why smudge it?

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Mapped and bombed - Tamil rebel training camp?

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:00:10 +0000

On July 30, the Sri Lankan air force bombed what they allege is a Tamil Tiger training camp, and released the video. Bloggers (and the local media) have been quick to locate the spot on Google Earth, where you can see high resolution imagery taken from 2003, before structures on the location were built.

Here is the Google Map of the place:

View Larger Map

Here is a still from the military-supplied video. Click to see the YouTube video:

I went looking at Microsoft's and Yahoo's imagery to see if they might have more recent hi-res imagery, but both maxed out at 15 meters per pixel. It's in places like these, not in cities, where I get impressed when there is sub-meter resolution, even if it's from 2003. This is one more reason why globally Google Earth and Map's uptake is so much higher than the competition.

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Virtual globes in Second Life

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:28:38 +0000

It occurred to me just the other day that NOAA's Eric Hackathorn, whom I had met last year at ISDE5, had then said that he was thinking of making a programmable virtual globe in Second Life. I fired off an email to him wondering if he'd ever followed up on that idea. Sure enough, he writes that late last year he and ~~his game-developer wife~~ (SL name) Zora Spoonhammer created "Sculpty Earth" which was then extensively reviewed by Wagner James Au in New World Notes. YouTube excerpt:

A clever piece of hacking projects a movie of recent global cloud map images onto a transparent array floating above the Earth, letting you follow cloud patterns.

Very Caspar David Friedrich of me, no?

But that wasn't the end of the project. In the last few months the duo have created two more Earths, both works in progress. Below one of them you'll find a Google Maps application projected onto a plane that lets you load KML files, and which is controlled by nearby buttons. I managed to load some of my own KML content, and navigate around, albeit clumsily.

And while you also can't click on the map to navigate or interact with the KML, the important point to take home from this proof of concept is that visitors are engaging in social cartography — anything that my avatar pulls up, your avatar can see too in real time. SL developers Daden Limited used similar technology in their Second Life Google Maps, blogged here a few months ago.

The map also lets you get a geosearch going:

Sure enough, when I went looking on the virtual globe:

There are far more efficient ways of finding Cairo, of course, but that's not the point — these are the first steps in radically new ways of navigating information.

Independently, I got an email from Magnus Zeisig where he writes that the interest in his recently reviewed Second Life map of Sweden had compelled him to experiment with making an entire virtual globe in Second Life. He'd also just found Eric and Zora's Earth — his in comparison is smaller, but with vertical heights exaggerated 100-fold and with accurate bathymetry. And if you walk into the Earth's center, you'll see an exhibition he is building about different map projections.

All these Earths aren't nearly as smooth as dedicated virtual globe applications, or even browser-based virtual globes. That's because Second Life is a general-purpose 3D programmable environment — so you lose speed, but get versatility. And these Second Life globes are social — visitors share the same world-state — which in turn opens up interesting possibilities for teaching and science outreach to classrooms. It's early days yet — and in the meantime, these virtual virtual globes can hold their own purely as works of art that play with our notions of scale and space.

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Links: levelHead; whither PhotoSynth? Multitouch sphere coming

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:09:02 +0000

Thinking inside the box: Not immediately geospatial, but certainly spatial: Behold the awesome levelHead game, by New Zealand's Julian Oliver:

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

Photosynth to Virtual Earth? Yesterday, we all read the post by Microsoft's Chris Pendleton that Microsoft's Photosynth photo geopositioning Live Labs research project had graduated to the Virtual Earth team, the implication being that we would soon see this "productized" inside Virtual Earth.

But by this morning, the link to the post went dead, and there is no more trace of the news in Chris's archives. False alarm? Premature anouncement? Was it meant to be a secret?

Pity, as I was going to build a post around it about how it really is high time that Microsoft expends more resources on making its web services truly standards-based, i.e. platform neutral. Google Earth's 3D web plugin is just a few months old and is only a month away from getting a Mac version. Virtual Earth 3D has been out for over a year and a half and still has no cross-platform support. Photosynth, should it be heading for mainstream browser support, really also needs to work on the Mac.

The reason is simple: Developers don't want to use APIs to build consumer-oriented web services until the results work in a browser irrespective of operating system. Once Mac support arrives for the Google Earth plugin, that's when its API will enter mainstream use by developers. Microsoft's geoweb apps are ignoring the Mac minority, which is why they get comparatively less traction.

Multi-touch spherical display coming: Microsoft will be displaying one at a booth at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008 to be held this week, according to the floor plan. Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet has more info: It is a multitouch sphere made by Global Imagination, one of a small group of spherical display manufacturers. For a recent overview of spherical displays, check out this Ogle Earth entry from a few months ago.

[Update 14:48 GMT: The YouTube demo is up!:]

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400 million Google Earth users. Really?

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:56:36 +0000

In his Geoweb 2008 keynote speech, Michael Jones mentioned that among the 1 billion online, there are "400 million Google Earth users", and that this "constituency" is bigger than the number of Americans.

Time for a reality check. That number for "Google Earth users" can't be unique users. Downloads, sure, but not users. Just think about it: Let's even allow 1.4 billion online people in 2008; less than a quarter of them have access to broadband, according to Gartner. And among broadband users, businesses are over-represented — businesses where a program like Google Earth is less likely to be downloaded. To get to the total of 400 million users, every computer on the planet connected to broadband would have to have Google Earth installed, plus a whole lot of people sucking Earth through a 56kbps straw.

Whence the discrepancy? I've done my part, downloading Google Earth at least a few dozen times between different versions and successive machines from all sorts of different IP addresses. And likely so have you. This is not to take anything away from the fantastic uptake of Google Earth, not least in the zeitgeist of the world's technology elites; but just as websites no longer advertise the number of "hits" on their site, isn't it time for a more conservative number on Google Earth users? Surely Google Earth can concoct a unique hash number for each install so that Google can acquire data for unique visitors per month, just like top websites do? Why not then release that if advertising the popularity of Google Earth is important?

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Links: Flight path KML, Avi to Microsoft, future location

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:52:33 +0000

Flight path KML: Brian Mayer found Google Earth's flight simulator's learning curve steep, "so I decided to create a set of runway outlines and flight paths to serve as guides for getting from Point A to Point B." The result is a KML package of 239 runways in 94 cities with 24 flight paths between them. I took it for a spin, and sure enough, I managed to land without crashing for the first time ever.

Avi Bar-Zeev to Microsoft: Keyhole co-founder Avi Bar-Zeev writes on his blog that he has just joined Microsoft. Avi left Keyhole in 2001 — Keyhole was acquired by Google in 2004 and its Earth product became Google Earth in 2005. What will he be working on?
As to what I’ll be working on, keep in mind, my new supervisor actually found me and recruited me via this blog. That might help you make some guesses as to what we’re interested in.
And on his blog, he's been writing perceptive posts about the 3D internet lately:-)

Thinking about future location: I ended up watching Peter Batty's entire presentation at GeoWeb on "Future Location and Social Networking". I hadn't planned to, but I was surprised to find a lot more deep thinking than I imagined was possible about this market segment. Peter's put a lot of his thoughts into action with whereyougonnabe, a FaceBook application that competes with Dopplr. At the end of the video, there are some cool Google Earth visualizations.

Improvements in Google Maps ads: Valery Hronusov forwarded this, in case not all Google Maps developers had seen it. The Google Maps API now has much improved handling of Google ads, so you might want to go revisit your code.

EarthBrowser presentation: Matt Giger of EarthBrowser presents a Google Tech talk about his virtual globe, in which he also makes the case for a better representation of time in KML. In a separate post, he looks forward to Flash 10, as it would give him the ability to add 3D terrain to EarthBrowser.

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Links: Microsoft frees trueSpace, novel map use, British Columbia frees geodata

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:25:20 +0000

Microsoft frees trueSpace 3D authoring tool: Microsoft's Chris Pendleton over on his blog announces that trueSpace 7.6 — the $595 3D authoring tool by the recently acquired Caligari — is now free for all to download (Windows only), putting it smack in the same competitive space as Google SketchUp, with a similar ability to create 3D models and then position them on a virtual globe, in this case Virtual Earth. Chris's post is detailed, and he implies that trueSpace is a much more advanced tool than SketchUp. (I haven't had a chance to compare.)

Not sure where this leaves Dassault Systemes 3DVIA, which Microsoft integrated into Virtual Earth as a kind of browser-based 3D authoring competitor to SketchUp. Ironically, it turns out that while Google's been working on a browser-based version of its stand-alone virtual globe, Microsoft's been working on acquiring a standalone replacement for its browser-based 3D authoring tool:-)

Novel map use: Clyde Ford writes:
Thought you might be interested in my new geo-mashup that integrates VE and GE, switching between the two for the best satellite imagery. I'm a long-time software developer, but also a thriller writer, who wanted to design a site that allows readers to fly-to places in my book and once there to enjoy multimedia experiences. Hang out on the site long enough and you'll hear Morgan Freeman's voice talking about Precious Cargo, my latest book.
It's Windows only for now. For a book that name-checks a lot of locations (as a nautical novel is wont to do), this is certainly an interesting way of making places come alive.

British Columbia geodata in Google Earth: The Map Room finally made me look. Here is a belated link to guided tours of some lovely geospatial data of British Columbia in Google Earth.

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Sentinel AVE: Fuse live streaming videos to the 3D landscape (!)

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:02:07 +0000

Back in April 2006, Ogle Earth flagged GeoDec, a research project by grad students at the University of Southern California that allowed you to project live video streams onto a 3D landscape. The research had support from both Google and Microsoft, and came with an eye-popping video of what the future held.

The future is now. GeoDec's demo site is gone, but out of its ashes comes Sentinel AVE, a company, and Augmented Virtual Earth (AVE), their product. USC's researchers have turned their project into a business. And good for them.

As told by this impressive video demo, AVE is a fully fledged virtual globe with 3D DEMs, textured urban buildings, accurate sun positioning and support for KML as well as buildings taken from Google's 3D Warehouse. But the single most impressive feature is the seemingly scalable ability to "fuse" any number of streaming videos to the landscape, so that surveillance cameras can collectively paint a a whole region in live 3D video.

That's a first. Yes, Second Life has the ability to show a video in-world onto a screen, but an avatar can only see one at any one time. SkylineGlobe also lets you add 2D video clips in their globe, but you can't distort the projection so that it fits around a 3D object, like AVE does. Sentinel AVE seems to have cracked the scalability issue, something which their video says involves a patent pending method. According to them, AVE runs on current laptops (though I'm guessing it's Windows only).

If you visit Sentinel AVE's about page there is no doubt that much of their original backing is (US) military in nature. But the video's virtual visit of the Googleplex and the seamless integration with Google's 3D Warehouse hints at some collaboration with Google's geo team.

If you want to buy Augmented Virtual Earth, you need to send them an email. If you have to ask how much it costs, though, you probably can't afford it, and that's probably because you're not the military, a city or big company wanting 3D video surveillance of a region. Still, today's cool new technologies are tomorrow's Google acquisitions, right?:-)

Five years from now, we may all be pointing our webcams out the window, contributing to a global live 3D video mosaic open to all. Then Google Earth (or a live video version of Microsoft's Photosynth in Virtual Earth) would do to surveillance what it did to remote sensing intelligence gathering — bring it to the masses, replacing big brother with millions of little brothers. (Via Diserto)

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Links: Ipoki + Qik = georeferenced mobile phone video webcasting

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:16:07 +0000

Finally! Live georeferenced mobile phone web video: Live mobile phone video streaming site Qik and live GPS phone position site Ipoki have collaborated to let you live stream video from your mobile phone to the web while also showing your location in real time. Here's the obligatory YouTube showing it off:

This is the first instance I am aware of where you can publish live georeferenced video to the web from your mobile phone. (Seero lets you do it from your GPS enabled laptop with video camera.)

Where is Captain Bill? Virgil Zetterlind of EarthNC writes:
Captain Bill Foster and EarthNC have partnered to live-cast the delivery of a 46' cruiser from New Buffalo, Michigan to Marco Island, Florida starting today the 22nd of July. Capt Foster and his crew are presently in the Chicago area and will begin to traverse the city via the Chicago River at approximately 2pm EDT this afternoon.

Via cell-phone aircard, Capt Foster is uploading his position and a webcam image approximately once per minute to EarthNC.com. You can watch his track in Google Maps and Google Earth and see his latest photos here. His position and images will automatically update so long as he has an available cell data connection

One Man Resting: A few days ago Craig Stanton finished his walk across Japan, which he documented on georeferenced video using Seero.

Near real-time aerial imagery? Perhaps the most-heard complaint about the free aerial and satellite imagery in Google Earth and Virtual Earth is that it sometimes is a few years old. If an Australian company gets its way, this may soon change. From an ITWire article:
According to [Perth-based] Ipernica, "NearMap's technology enables very high resolution aerial photomaps with multiple angle views to be created at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions... For the first time, people will be able to see the environment change over time, as NearMap's online photomaps allow users to move back and forward month by month to see changes occur, such as the construction of a home or development of a new road. [And] with NearMap's revolutionary approach to high resolution photomaps, it has achieved its objective of a 20-fold operating cost reduction over current industry practices."
Panning not just through the X and Y axes but also through time would definitely be cool. Let's just hope it's as scalable as advertised. There's more details in the ITWire article.

Afghan archaeology redux: The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on David Thomas's use of Google Earth to map Afghan archaeological sites, and it comes with another fine aerial shot of a Ghaznavid fortress in the Registan desert. This one I couldn't locate at all, however. Does anyone else have any better luck?

Virtual Earth update (including Berlin): Lots of new imagery for Virtual Earth, especially for Europe, and including bird's eye imagery for all of Berlin, where I happen to be summering. Check out that architectural wonder of an airport, Tempelhof, smack in the middle of the city, to which I walked a few weeks ago to take a flight. That very same day was also the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift. I made a small portfolio of photos on Flickr of Tempelhof, as the airport is slated to close soon. ~~(PS, looks like I still can't embed Virtual Earth maps on a web page, or I would have done so here instead of giving you a URL to the airport.)~~ See comments.

QSL2KML: Amateur radio operators use QSLs as a way of confirming reception of a broadcast in faraway places. As they are by nature georeferenced, they'd make a great KML file. And that is precisely what KML My QSLSs does, for free.

Geonames unplugged: The Map Room points to a 1930s globe "with a complete index and gazetteer inside it." Just in case we start to take Geonames for granted.

Satellite imagery primer: Discover Magazine on the rise of ubiquitous free satellite and aerial imagery on the internet. Interesting primer on much of what this blog has covered the past three years. One excerpt makes an ironic point:
Indeed, while the U.S. government prohibits sale of satellite imagery with ground resolution better than a half-meter [of the US by US-based companies], no such rule applies to images from nonsatellite sources. So while a satellite company may be forced to “fuzz up” an image of, say, CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, to meet the half-meter standard, that same picture is available in even sharper focus from aerial photographs on Google Earth.
In the rest of the world, the situation is the other way round. US satellites can take as much imagery as they want from space (with the sole exception of Israel and the Palestinian Territories), but aerial photography — such as that of the Netherlands used in Google Earth — is subject to censorship by the sovereign power because it is taken from the national airspace. (Via All Points Blog)

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HeyWhatsThat visualization tools for August 1 solar eclipse

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:33:59 +0000

Michael Kosowsky of HeyWhatsThat writes:

I've enhanced HeyWhatsThat's astronomical sites for the August 1 total solar eclipse [over Siberia]. By using topocentric rather than geocentric place for the Moon and interpolating planetary positions, the images now better match what I'd guess is the gold standard: NASA's Solar Eclipse Web Site (If you're going to spend time or money traveling to see the eclipse, please use their numbers, not mine.)

The planisphere:
This KML file is an animation for the spot in Siberia projected to see the maximum eclipse.
If you visit the planisphere site (or the advanced planisphere) you can generate Google Earth KML animations of the eclipse for any other location.
The cosmic visibility site:
Visit the site and you can see a simulation of the eclipse in your browser, again for either your own location or the eclipse maximum in Siberia. Just click on one of the "August solar eclipse" links under "interesting events".
As of this writing the "Earth" tab doesn't show the path of the Moon's shadow, but the NASA site does a great job of that here. Be sure to click on their map to get the eclipse circumstances for any location.

With the new Google Earth API — the ability to put Google Earth inside a web browser and control it programmatically — I hope to merge a lot of the planisphere and cosmic functionality into a single site... but probably not before the eclipse.

Google Earth Blog also has an entry with a KML link to the path of totality for the eclipse.

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Second Life map of Sweden

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:37:43 +0000

Swedish programming virtuoso Magnus Zeisig as just published an accurate 3D map of Sweden in Second Life that can be scripted to show all kinds of data and run all sorts of animations. You can visit it in Second Life here, and it looks like this:

How did he make it? Magnus writes:

Topography data were processed using PERL programs of own design. Topography data and geographic data were conically projected using the program DAZ/Eovia Carrara. Population and area data were processed using Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic programs of own design. Final topographic sculpt, geographic and heraldic images were prepared using Adobe Photoshop.

Magnus used Second Life's sculpted prims to build the landscape, and on top of it you can today turn on/off "layers" with city names and cylinders that represent population, which is done using the Linden Scripting Language. (When you visit, click on the map for animation options and more info.)

Magnus has more in store, including a search function and animations for ship and rail traffic. It certainly not as easy as making a quick and dirty KML file for Google Earth, and no doubt takes more work than building something with the new Google Earth API, but when it comes to programming an interactive 3D map to measure, this example shows it's certainly feasible in the versatile 3D programmable space that is Second Life. (Previously on Ogle Earth: Magnus's planetarium in Second Life)

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