It’s been busy at work, and during the next week I will be in Taipei, so pardon the haphazard posting frequency, the abbreviated style below… and expect things to get worse around here before they back to normal. Meanwhile:
- Link your rowing machine to Google Earth and use the ErgTour application to row up the Charles river in Google Earth. Brilliant! (Promised soon: Directions for creating your own routes.)
- Have you seen NASA’s NEO (NASA Earth Observations) site recently? WOW. A treasure trove of searchable, customizable content, and all of it available as KMZ files to “Open in Google Earth”. What, don’t those files work in NASA World Wind?:-)
- Planet 9 Studios has some truly lovely 3D models of temples in Kyoto.
- Both O’Reilly Radar and 3PointD carry news and pictures of a really cool experiment: Aimee Weber’s 3D animated weather map for NOAA inside Second Life. Why might you want to do this instead of on Google Earth? Because Second Life has much better scripting tools for 3D animations. And since nobody else has made the explicit Snow Crash reference yet, I will: In Snow Crash, CIC Earth is actually part of the Metaverse, much as this 3D animated map is part of Second Life. And so life continues to imitate art in wonderful ways.
- The future of NASA World Wind is with Java, reports The Earth is Square. .NET development will stop after the next release, and a alpha JAVA version is due perhaps in December. I think this makes complete sense if you want to play in the big leagues. Not having cross-platform compatibility is not an option anymore for mainstream web services.
- After his Swiss trains stations layer, Chaver turns his attention to Israeli airports. This time, the KML is a self-updating network link, which allows the KML to return arrival and departure info right in the pop-up box.
- Valery Hronusov has taken some MODIS imagery from above California and wrung it through his Superoverlay application. Not for the faint of CPU. BTW, Since last reviewed on Ogle Earth, Superoverlay is up to version 1.2.2, with lots of new features.
- Declan Butler turns the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index into a Google Earth overlay.
- Google Blogoscoped thinks Google should acquire TerraGo Technologies. I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea: TerraGo Technologies has technology that converts GIS files into PDFs. PDFs are for printing. Google is a web company. There are far better ways of storing semantic content online than in PDFs.
- Tim Beermann has started work on Shape2Earth Beta 3.
- For Mac users: GeoLibro uses AppleScript to let you geotag iTunes music with Google Earth. Why, you might ask? GeoLibro has a stab at explaining:-)
Stefan, Declan Butler explains why he choose GE to display the data in a comment on this entry: http://appdomains.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/30/1419220
Actually.. I had NEO Imagery in World Wind a few months ago. But we have learned that how they generate the images doesn’t work well. They are unique URLs, not static ones.
The KMLs they produce also suffer the same fate and you have to re-download if you want updates.
Regarding the KMLs in NEO, I thought they were good because they do not rely upon dynamic URLs that must be refreshed each time the KML is opened. Instead, the image is included in the KMZ file, and since it is a historic image there is no need to refresh it every time.