Short news: “Video on terrain”

  • Darryl Lyon’s Blog alerts me to a demo of what I consider to be something of a killer feature for virtual globes: “Video on terrain”, depicted rather persuasively with SkylineGlobe in this CNet online video from Where 2.0. Granted, SkylineGlobe isn’t out yet, and there is no way to know how scalable this feature is, but only two months ago, video painted onto 3D surfaces was high-end stuff for a media lab — witness GeoDec (third item from the top — and note who is sponsoring GeoDec; gotta love competition).
  • Tim Beermann, maker of Shape2Earth (beta), writes a succinct “state of the geobrowsers” post worth reading, including the comments. (BTW, Shape2Earth works fine in Google Earth 4 (beta), according to one user.)
  • I’m not sure if the network links ever did show the V70 sailing race in the North Sea live, but these snapshots on ZNO of the race in progress depict some very nifty sailboat model rendering work by ZNO that you can zoom onto. Mediality has more on the race itself.
  • And the user-authored 3D-fication of Google’s Earth begins in earnest: Ciko does the buildings for downtown Jakarta (English text and link at the bottom of the post.)
  • IntelliGolf 8.0 for PocketPC lets you use Google Earth to enter golf course information before you play on it.