Thursday marked World Oceans Day, a United Nations effort to “raise global awareness of the challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans.”
Getting in the spirit, Google Earth and about a dozen research labs paired their data, talents and technology to create highres maps of seafloor terrain. Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led the charge contributing its Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) Synthesis and some 20 years worth of data from 500 ship cruises.
The interactive topo maps they created portray an underwater area bigger than North America. Such visualizations help scientists understand natural and man-made disasters including: tsunami events and runups, earthquakes… → Read More
There’s no way around it: this is pretty neat. This here video shows a bunch of teenagers, from Japan, running a sky-diving simulation using nothing more than Google Earth and a projector+blank mat. → Read More
There’s an easy way to tell that Google Earth is getting so advanced that it’s getting dangerously close to looking like actual Earth: touted new features are kind of humorous. While version 4 brought the sky, and version 5 brought the oceans, now version 6 is bringing trees. Yes, trees. I fully expect version 7 to highlight the addition of dirt.
Kidding aside, the latest version is obviously the best one yet. And trees are obviously a hugely important part of the Earth. To get them into Google Earth, the search giant has made 3D models of over 50 different species of trees. And they’ve included over 80 million of them in various places around the world including Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo. They’re also working with some conservation organizations to model threatened forests around the world. → Read More
Google has added weather data to its Google Earth application. As of now, the new feature only supports locations in North America and parts of Europe. → Read More
Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hiker;s Edition. One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.
If you collect other data about your trip, such as your heart rate or other body monitoring stats, those can be overlayed as a graph below at the bottom of the screen. I’d love to see an iPhone or Android fitness app that takes advantage of these new capabilities. → Read More
When the Google Nexus One was announced, there were several cool new features unveiled for the device and Android 2.1: interactive wallpapers, 3D graphics and support for Google Earth. The latter wasn’t available at the time, and there was no date set, but it looks like it’s available on Android Market now. → Read More
The Audi A8 is a nerdgasm on wheels. It was the only car that had a line to sit in it yesterday during the last press day at the Detroit Auto Show. So I skipped it. Shame on me. Good thing The German Car Blog was there and got a nice demo of the car’s Google Earth app. → Read More
le global warming would be to curb deforestation around the world. Google is helping today on the monitoring front by combining satellite imagery from Google Earth with heavy computational analysis in the cloud. Studying satellite imagery can identify where deforestation is occurring, but serious analysis requires a lot of computational power to compare images over time and locate illegal deforestation activity before it is too late to do anything about it.
The image above, for instance, shows deforestation in Rondonia, Brazil over the last two decades, with recent activity in red. The red spots in the image below show deforestation hot spots in the past 30 days. Google is working in collaboration with scientists who have created software to analyze deforestation activity as seen through satellite imagery. But the desktop computers these scientists typically use can take days to run each analysis. By moving that to more powerful computers in the cloud, Google can reduce that time to seconds while also making available literally petabytes of raw satellite imagery data. → Read More
At Google I/O this year, one demo booth stood out above all others: The Holodeck. It was basically eight giant, long screens arranged in a circle that displayed Google Street View imagery. When you stepped into the contraption, it was a bit like zooming around outside. Today, Google has taken the time to explain the project a bit, which it now calls “Liquid Galaxy.”
Apparently, the reason for the name change is that the booth now displays much more than just Street View. Google has made a modified Google Earth client so that you can go anywhere in the world in the device now. And you can even go to the Moon and Mars with it. “It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy,” Google writes. → Read More
Google is launching their version of Sim City today, Google Building Maker. The tool lets you create buildings for Google Earth. Building Maker lets you pick any building and construct a 3D version of it using photos and building blocks provided by Google. Google says that buildings are relatively fast to construct using their tool, taking only a matter of minutes.
Building Maker runs within your web browser and connect with your Google Account so you can get credit for your building. You can also use Google SketchUp to edit or modify your creation. → Read More
The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, may or may not be dead after a CIA missile hits his father-in-law’s home in the remote “Zangarha area” of the country. But now we can see exactly where that missile hit, and we don’t even need access to a spy satellite. Thanks to Google Earth, we get the image above.
Stefan Geens pinpointed the location on his blog Ogle Earth using location information gathered from news accounts. He also figured out where the supposed burial ground was. A decade ago, only a handful of people would have had access to such satellite imagery. Today, anyone can download it for free. CIA and military satellites are still higher resolution, but it makes you wonder how fast the geo-information gap between governments and citizens is closing. → Read More
As an online entity, Google is constantly evolving and improving its products. Some updates are silly, but some are far more serious and meant for good. Its update today to Google Earth to expand its Darfur coverage, is the latter.
Using data from the U.S. State Departments Humanitarian Information Unit and working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google now shows more than 3,300 villages (yes, entire villages) that have been decimated during the genocide. Google notes that while the numbers have been known for some time, actually seeing the decimation in more detail than ever before provides a clearer understanding of the devastation. → Read More
This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more.
The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth. → Read More
Google Earth has proven to be a powerful and useful tool for combing the Earth. The virtual-earth application has helped solve a plane crash mystery, was used for a marijuana bust and lets you explore Disneyland Paris. Now, Google Earth is adding something more practical It will let you see businesses and related information on both its desktop and iPhone apps.
By adding a “Businesses” layer to Google Earth, you’ll be able to see businesses by default when you start the application. Google Earth will list businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores. As you zoom in further to the map, you’ll see more businesses. When you click on the icons, you’ll get additional information like the address. telephone number, reviews, and hours. → Read More
In 1992, Disney decided to build upon the huge success of its Disneyland and Disney World theme parks by opening Euro Disney in a suburb of Paris. The company had previously licensed its name for a resort abroad just outside Tokyo, but the European version was a more ambitious project being handled by the company. It started out as a nightmare. Simply put, people didn’t go to it. And now you can avoid going to it from the comfort of your own home thanks to the magic of Google Earth.
Just as it did last year with Disney World, Google Earth now has Disneyland Paris (as it was rebranded to in 1995 following its thud of an opening) rendered in 3D. Disney has provided the program with some 85,000 photos — a huge 450GB worth — to make the renderings as realistic as possible. All the rides are there, the castle and even over 500 landscape elements. → Read More
The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years.
Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth. → Read More
If you’ve been using the recently released Google Earth 5.0 to check out what the oceans look like from beneath the water surface (tip: use the flight simulator to fly underwater), you’ll be happy to know that the company has extended that capability to the “Third Coast” of the U.S., meaning the five Great Lakes of North America (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) that form the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet (roughly 22% of it according to Wikipedia).
Through a cooperative effort with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Google Earth now incorporates detailed bathymetry for the five Great Lakes. Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.
Earlier this week the Google Earth team released a new plugin that allows users to view Google Earth tours directly from their web browsers. These tours, which were introduced in the 5.0 release of Google Earth in February, allow users to create virtual flythroughs through any location on Google Earth, which can lead to some pretty impressive results. Google has compiled a handful of the best tours in this gallery, which includes a reenactment of the historic Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson and a whirlwind tour through San Francisco.
The plugin weighs in at a hefty 30 MB (80 megabytes after installing on a Mac), so it can hardly be considered lightweight. But the functionality is impressive, and could definitely be used in a variety of innovative ways now that the tours have been freed from the Google Earth desktop client. I image news organizations could use the tours to help liven up online reports (tours can include audio voiceovers), and travel companies could use them to help showcase where their tour packages will take their customers. → Read More
UK tabloid The Sun has an article claiming that someone found Atlantis using Google Earth. As someone who’s personally interested in ancient mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and cryptozoology, I’m really happy that a tabloid has this story because it totally gives credence to the idea that Atlantis does, indeed, exist and should definitely silence all the naysayers. → Read More
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year brought any number of technologies “under the microscope”: Twitter can be used by terrorists to coordinate attacks; Google Earth can be used to map out possible attack routes, etc. Too bad Google completely disagrees with this slipshod logic. → Read More
