- Arctic Melt: Ross Swick of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center writes:
With just a little over two months until the Arctic sea ice minimum I’ve put together a new animation for Google Earth. I’ve created an animation of Arctic sea ice concentration for the last 60 days which will be updated daily. The idea is folks can watch the arctic melt as it’s happening this summer.
Very cool. Download page is here (first in the list). Ross stresses that the animation is still in beta for another week or so, and that he’s appreciate any suggestions for improvements. If the Northwest passage opens up this summer, you’ll be able to check for yourself.
- DeepPhoto: I haven’t seen this distributed widely, so be sure to watch the video below about how Microsoft has been using geospatial technologies to enhance photographs. You know how when you see FBI types enhance photos in outlandish ways on CSI or Law and Order and you go “that’s not possible?” I had that same impulse while watching this video, except that here it is very possible. If you want to know what kind of plugins you will be getting for Photoshop CS5, click play…
Video: Virtual Earth Demo at Microsoft Pro Photo Summit – LiveSide.net
- YA3DGE: Jonathan Thompson of Humanlink writes:
I spent the weekend at O’Reilly’s FooCamp in Sebastopol, CA. One of the items demo’d was a screen treated with a 3D laminate. We were controlling Google Earth with a SpaceNavigator. We all had 3D glasses on; a ddd.com driver was used to do the split. I am pretty sure Damien [Stolarz] was the individual I was speaking to and I just noticed his write-up here.
- iPhone location-aware apps: I wanted to get an iPhone just so I could write a post on location-aware apps, but unfortunately I can’t just buy one where I happen to be and drop in a sim card (how I hate phone locking!). Fortunately, Brady Forrest on O’Reilly Radar has gone and written that very post.
- NOAA coastal charts: Bill Zissimopoulos of Navimatics writes:
I have developed a set of marine maps for the US coastline derived from NOAA’s Electronic Navigation Charts, which is viewable in Google Earth. I am wondering if you have the time and interest to review them for your blog. My website is here. The online charts can be accessed here.
The service is free, and the network link works fine:
Notice the use of Amazon AWS S3 for the kmz files. (kml.navimatics.com.s3.amazonaws.com) Not too much chance of getting Slashdotted using S3. It is interesting to note that no EC2 web service is required just a direct link to the s3 kmz files. Makes a nice combination of the Free ENC data, GoogleEarth, and Amazon AWS.