Digital Distributed Environment‘s Andrew Hudson-Smith applied textures to a model of a row of houses in London, using his own in-house software to ensure accurate scaling of the photographs. The result, viewed in Google Earth, is very cool, and it’s a precurser of what we can expect to see much more of:

I especially like how the signs and awnings are rendered in 3D and textured. It’s a lovely touch, and it is easy to imagine walking along this street:

My other initial impression is that this technology is going to provide a potent new weapon in the “eye candy wars” that Google and Microsoft are informally engaged in. Live Local’s “bird’s eye view” imagery can’t compete with such imagery pasted onto true 3D models. We’ll have to wait and see how Microsoft leverages its purchase of Vexcel and Geotango in response.

Andrew asks for feedback. In my case, Google Earth 4.0 Free for Mac handled the file well, after one initial crash and then a bout of the hiccups that cleared up by itself. Just don’t forget that GE4 is _beta_; it sometimes stalls for me on other files as well.

I’ve been trying out the test version of Picasa that publishes web albums and lets you geotag photos with Google Earth. I imported some photos of Stockholm, geotagged them, and published them as a web album.

I’m completely impressed. The process manages to combine absolute ease of use with all the power that Google Earth now musters. It took me no time at all to pinpoint seven photos to within a meter’s accuracy, and I found myself smiling at the ingenuity of it all.

Here’s how it works: Start with some imported photos. Highlight them. Go to the Tools menu, select Geotag > Geotag with Google Earth.

Google Earth pops up with big crosshairs at the center of the screen. At the edge of the screen, a floating window that shows you the photo you need to georeference.

Drag the Earth. Click. Next. Repeat until done. Placemark icons are generated automatically from the image, and the collected whole is turned into a folder ready for export as KML. (Here is the KMZ file of the Stockholm photos.) Once Done, Picasa marks the photo icons with a small symbol, denoting that they have been geotagged.

Publishing them to a web album is just as seamless. Push a button, log in to your Google account, choose a name and whether your folder is public, and you’re done. in fact, once you have a Picasa Web Album account, you don’t even need the Picasa standalone application. You can upload photos directly, via the web client, albeit without Picasa’s georeferencing abilities.

There is still room for development, of course. The public web albums do not yet offer up a KML link for georeferenced photos, and the RSS feed that accompanies the photos does not do GeoRSS. Integration with Google Maps would also make sense, in case you’re travelling and want to georeference your roadrip pictures. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

The integration between Picasa and Google Earth is the first instance I can think of from the past year where Google develops something geo-savvy that risks competing with the freelance developers in its ecosphere. There are other tools out there that use Maps and Earth to georeference photos, mainly connected to Flickr, but also dedicated ones, like Panoramio. (Panoramio’s strengths lie elsewhere, though — in social mapping.) In this case, however, the advantage of the ease of use of the integration is so great, that anyone using Google Earth should download Picasa, and anyone with Picasa should download Google Earth. And that’s precisely how the game is won against Microsoft and Yahoo!.

What about Apple’s iPhoto? That only integrates with .Mac’s web publishing, for which you pay, and there are no georeferencing tools in sight. Picasa is looking far more interesting at the moment. Luckily, my MacBook Pro boots into Windows:-)

• rsgrillo writes that he has already updated his free-yet-very-capable GE-Path tool to be compatible with KML 2.1. (It’s now up to v.1.4.1 — for Windows.) An update for GE-Graph is in the works, he adds. In the meantime, please report bugs.
• Tractor-owning southern Alaskan golfer Avi Bar-Ze’ev posts the first big-picture musings on the implications of the new KML features and the integration between Picasa and Google Earth.
• Not having tested it myself, Google Earth Community poster Marc_B instead explains how to use Google Earth from within Picasa.
• Brian Flood says that the next version of Arc2Earth will automate the production of KML Super-Overlays from ArcGIS raster files:
  

  The tile cutting routines were already in the [Arc2Earth] product but until the 2.1 spec, there was no good way to efficientlly load and display them from GE. kudos to Google for this support!

• Product announcement: A tool to export all manner of content from Intergraph’s GeoMedia into KML, by Austrian company GISQUADRAT. Here’s a lovely brochure in German.
• Skyline announces a virtual globe competitor, SkylineGlobe, “available for the public shortly.” Looks like it will be a Windows only release, judging by the screenshots. (Via Geography 2.0)

I keep on forgettting to blog Google Earth 4.0 beta’s release notes. It’s a fount of troubleshooting tips (especially for your graphics card). There are also some otherwise unheralded gems:

• You can navigate diagonally by pressing combinations of cursor keys (such as up and left).
• You can now get high-resolution imagery across the entire screen, not just the middle squares (at least if you crank up all the settings in the preferences/ options pane.)

From a long list, here are two very useful workarounds (quoting verbatim):

– Drag-n-drop inside the Places window doesn’t scroll and doesn’t give enough visual feedback. You can use cut-paste to move items long distances in the scroll.

– If you enable a folder full of overlays, you may require more resources (video memory and main memory) than your system is capable of. Killing the application may be your only exit.

Re the navigation: You may have noticed that the new transparent navigator is missing the button that returned you to the 90-degree top-down view. Instead, just type U. To orient North, double click on the N in the navigator, or just type N. To do both, save a keystroke and type R.

Just for the record, it’s possible to navigate using only keyboard shortcuts: Shift + the cursor keys changes tilt and direction; Mac-Command or Win-Option + up or down keys zooms in and out. (The “+” and “-” keys work too.) Adding the Option key to all these combinations slows down the movement, for fine tuning. This is how I navigate most of the time.

The EULA for the Free and Plus version of Google Earth 4.0 has had a slight reorganization, with a crucial sentence getting promoted nearer to the top.

Before (version 3.0):

1. LICENSE GRANT This Software is for non-commercial use only and your rights in the Software are strictly limited to home, personal or recreational use only by you and not for the benefit of third parties.

[ … Lots of legalese … ] You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties.

After (version 4.0 beta):

1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties.

That’s the hint an earlier Ogle Earth post was looking for: Do not use Google Earth Free or Plus at the office (“commercial or business environment”). You’ll need to pay $400 per year for a Pro license. Here’s a product comparison chart for the Free, Plus and Pro versions.

Google Earth as universal geobrowser hasn’t quite arrived yet. If you need a free geobrowser at work, use the very capable NASA World Wind. It too runs KML, though not yet the fancier parts of KML 2.1.

Where 2.0 is getting plenty of blogging coverage. I’m reading lots via Planet Geospatial, so no need to duplicate the effort here. Nevertheless, some favorites from day one:

• Glenn Letham’s Where 2.0 photos on Flickr.
• Where 2.0’s “official” photos, also on Flickr.
• Juice Anaytics’ KML files of US census data works perfectly in Google Maps, and was demoed by Google.
• Ed Parsons on sleeping with the bear…

It looks like Google’s geo-announcements for the week aren’t over yet.

A few hours ago, sharable web albums for Google’s new version of the Picasa photo editor went live for a test run, and the resulting functionality is not unlike Flickr’s. Here is a sample public gallery. (CNET has an early review, Google Blogoscoped does a roundup of early feedback. Me, I’m still waiting on my Web albums invite:-)

Now for the geo-news: On Flickr, an intriguing screenshot shows Flickr user Adski georeferencing/geotagging his Picasa photos from within Google Earth. His photos are listed like placemarks in his Places pane, like so:

That’s news too me, and if confirmed, very cool indeed. (Although it’s not clear from the example, it looks like two-way integration between the applications.) We’ll have to await a formal announcement to see wether this also heralds server-hosted My Places for Google Earth, in addition to Picasa photos. It would certainly be in keeping with the direction Google has been heading in for its most recent launches.