The Google Earth Blog points us to a few new tutorials about using KML.
The first is all about time animations, including the London Eye and Frank Taylor’s Blue Marble.
The second deals with using KML in the Google Mashup Editor.
The full story in the Google Earth Blog goes into more detail explaining each of those KML articles.
I’ve just created a KMZ
(and posted it on Google Earth Hacks) that highlights some of the newsworthy locations related to the Georgia Drought.
It includes placemarks for things like Buford Dam on Lake Lanier and the Farley Nuclear power plant in Alabama. It also includes an overlay showing the watershed areas for the area basins and a few other bits and pieces.
For more information about the drought itself, you can visit the Atlanta Water Shortage blog.
Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog points us to an image overlay made using NOAA imagery of the fires in San Diego, California.
It really shows a significant amount of smoke coming from the fires. You can download the file here
, or you can visit the Google Earth Blog for more information.
Frank at the Google Earth Blog points us to a fun little easter egg in Google Earth – Steve Irwin (the late “Crocodile Hunter”) in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
To find him, simply turn on the 3D buildings layer, search for “Sydney Opera House” and look near the water on the north side of the building.
GEB has more info and short video
on how to find him.
As reported by the Google Earth Blog, there is now a new layer in Google Earth for geotagged YouTube videos. In the Windows version of GE the videos appear right in the description bubbles; in the Mac and Linux versions you get a link to view the video in a browser.
It works like most other layers – as you zoom further in, more videos appear. To get your video to appear, simply allow embedding and map its location. It should then appear in the next layer update, which occurs roughly once a month.
When Google Earth was first released, there was talk about it everywhere and they were overwhelmed with downloads. Since then, it’s become more and more popular. However, I’m sure there are a lot of folks that downloaded it two years ago, checked it out a little bit, and then haven’t gone back in. Here’s what you’re missing now:
10. PhotoOverlays: In the latest release of Google Earth they now have PhotoOverlays – photos that seem to be hung in mid-air or wrapped around a sphere.
9. Improved terrain: The 3D terrain in Google Earth is the main thing that separates it from Google Maps. You can tilt down and see the mountains and valleys in beautiful 3D. There is now an option to allow you to choose the terrain quality (lower=better performance, high=more eye candy).
8. Time animations: Starting with the beta version of GE4 you could have time animations — items that update as time rolls by. This can be for long periods (spread of Avian flu) or for short periods (“Blues Brother” car jumping a drawbridge).
7. New layers: Google Earth launched with an impressive collection of build-in layers. They’ve added tons more since then. My personal favorite is the “traffic” layer, which shows current traffic speeds in metro areas (Atlanta here). Dig into the layers and see all of the great new items in there.
6. SpaceNavigator support: If you’ve not used this 3D mouse-ish tool, you have to try it. It makes Google Earth a whole new toy. Read more about this at the Google Earth Blog, or try to win one by using GEboards.
5. Flight simulator: For a while, it was fun to try to fake being a flight simulator in Google Earth by simply plugging in joystick. With the release of version 4.2, they included a hidden flight sim. Simply press [CTRL]-[ALT]-[A] (Command-Option-A on Mac) and you can choose to fly either an F16 or an SR22!
4. Sky mode: Another great addition in version 4.2. By clicking the small “sky mode” button in Google Earth, you’ll be taken up to space and be shown the area exactly above where you were on the earth. You can browse, pan and zoom just as you would in earth mode, including support for the SpaceNavigator.
3. Flash support: Google Earth now supports Flash animations inside of the description bubbles (Windows only, though). This has allowed for obvious things such as embedding YouTube videos, but also for less-obvious things such as creating Flash-based forms to allow for an in-Earth message board.
2. 3D textures: When Google Earth first came out, people were amazed by the 3D buildings you could fly around. Problem was, they were all gray – solid, boring, gray. Since they, Google has built support for textures on the outside of buildings and the result is some cool looking cities. Denver, Colorado is probably the best example (it’s the home of SketchUp, the authoring tool for 3D models in Google Earth), so check it out.
1. Tons more imagery: Tons. Terabytes worth. Google has put out about eight huge imagery updates since they first released Google Earth, and each one has added thousands of square miles of fresh, higher quality images. Go check out your house again and you’ll probably find that it looks much better now than it did a few years ago.
There you go. 10 good reasons to go get the latest version of Google Earth and waste some time. If you’re looking for more fun stuff in Google Earth, go check out the huge KML file collection at Google Earth Hacks.
It only took a single week to have over 1,000 posts appear on GEboards. That was quick!
Some cities are already looking nicely annotated. How’s yours?
The Google Latlong blog has posted the answers to Google’s latest imagery release quiz.
It appears that Frank and company at the Google Earth Blog did a pretty good job
.
Check out the answers (with some screenshots).
Over on Google Earth Hacks we’ve just released GEboards, a completely in-Earth message board.
Following the release of Google Earth version 4.2, we realized that we could use the Flash player to accept text input in Google Earth. Many lines of code later, we have GEboards.
Once you load the KML, you can create threads about any location on earth – the restaurant down the road, the strange plane in the sky, etc. All of this happens without the need to use anything but Google Earth – not even the integrated web browser.
In addition, we’re giving away a SpaceNavigator
to one lucky user. Details on that can be found in our main forums here.
If you have any suggestions on how we could improve GEboards, please let us know.
Thanks!
(found via Natural Search Blog)
One of the first odd finds that we posted on Google Earth Hacks back in mid-2005 was a building in California that was shaped like a Swastika. Since that time, it’s been downloaded from GEH over 8,000 times. The same image on Flickr has been viewed over 16,000 times.
Chris Smith at the Natural Search Blog did some research into the building and found that is a Navy building, unintentionally built in that shape, because no one then expected millions of people to be able to view it from above.
CNN reported on the building today and included one new detail: The Navy has taken so much grief for the building that they’re going to spend about $600,000 to add landscaping and structures to make it look different from above.
As Chris says, while more and more companies are looking into rooftop advertising this is the first case of a building being modified just to improve PR.