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Links: Stereoscopic Google Earth, Zimbabwe violence maps

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  • Stereoscopic Google Earth in your browser! I again have no access to a Windows system, so I can’t test this, but I suspect that José Antonio Meira da Rocha’s implementation of a stereoscopic Google Earth in the browser by placing two instances of the Earth side by side but moving the point of view a little should be fantastic! José writes that he hacked the China Syndrome example om the GE 3D web plugin API site to get the result. Remember, the 3D GE plugin is not yet functional in Firefox 3, so try it on a Windows machine with Firefox 2 or Explorer. (Via Ogle Earth comments)
  • Mapping Zimbabwe’s election violence: On June 27, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will face the disastrous incumbent dictator Robert Mugabe in a run-off election that will no doubt be heavily rigged. Tsvangirai’s attempts to campaign across the country this month are being hindered at every opportunity, as his supporters are threatened or attacked… but one thing that can be done is to document these cases, and linking them to the places where they happened. Much of Zimbabwe is visible in high resolution on Google Earth, so Charles Worringham’s constantly updated KML layer of Tsvangirai’s campaign is an especially useful way into the details of how this election is progressing. Sokwanele’s “Mapping Terror in Zimbabwe: Political Violence & Elections 2008“, meanwhile, is a comprehensive Google Map of political attacks this year. Each placemark has a story attached. (Via This is Zimbabwe)
  • iPhone as unmanned drone brain: That was fast: iPhone Controls Robot Plane Squad. The video shows somebody inputting coordinates of a target a flying drone goes to photograph, eventhough the GPS iPhone won’t be out for another few weeks. Might they have used an external GPS? Video is worth watching. (Hat tip: Ed Corkery)
  • Poolcrashing: UK newspapers are all in a tizzy about how teenagers are using Facebook to organize to gatecrashing pool parties:

    The craze involves using the Google Earth programme, which provides high-quality aerial photos of Britain and other countries.

    If I were a teenager scoping for a pool to gatecrash, I’d use Microsoft’s bird’s eye view imagery — you can take a gander from all four sides, and likely also check the depth of the pool and the height of the fences — but youth these days obviously is not at resourceful as we used to be:-) (Spatial Law blog wants to know, But Is The Water Cold? Good point! Where’s our infra-red satellite view, so we can hunt the heated ones?)

  • Geo-marketing mania: Mike Pegg over at Google Maps Mania ends his tenure at the blog he started… to take a position at Google’s geo-marketing team. Congrats, Mike.
  • Mystery holes: In the Utah desert, some DIY geographers go investigate some strange circles they’ve spied on Google Earth.
  • Y! Geo? Y! Geo is “The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog … the place for Place”, though so far it’s only had one entry, and it’s from June 5. (Via the James Fee GIS blog)
  • Microsoft OS 7 touch UI: CrunchGear has some closeups of demos of how Microsoft’s upcoming surface technology can be used to, among other things, browse and edit photos geographically.
  • Silverlight Map Viewer: It doesn’t do anything that the Google Maps API or Microsoft’s own Virtual Earth API can’t do (yet), but IDV Solutions have released a mapping demo that uses Silverlight to access and view Virtual Earth tiles. If this is going to compete with Adobe Air and the EarthBrowser that was built with it, then there is still some work cut out for them, however:-) (Via Virtual Earth, An Evangelist’s Blog, which BTW has an interesting comment stream about licensing and Microsoft’s own integration of VE with Silverlight.

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