Very Spatial checks in on the state of spatial audio, linking to an Engadget post that in turn references a Sydney Morning Herald article on an Australian technology venture called Immersive Communications Environment (ICE). There is much speculation on how this will enhance gaming, but let’s not forget other potential uses: All this mapping and virtual globing is currently off limits to the visually impaired. Back in August last year, this blog speculated on whether spatialized sound might not be a way for the visually impaired to navigate a virtual globe. That possibility now seems closer than ever.

Google Earth was released almost a year ago, on June 28, 2005. One of the very first things I did with it was download Harry Love’s stages of the Tour de France, which ran from July 2 that year. Those files first made me aware of the possibilities for user-contributed mapping in Google Earth. I started this blog soon after.

Fast forward to June 2006. Harry has a new post up about Google Earth and the Tour de France, wherein he suggest plenty of new ways to get involved geospatially. (For starters, you can download the stages from Google Earth Community, courtesy of lucifer666.)

I’m glad that somebody’s finally located that giant disemboweled pink rabbit on an Italian hillside. Suddenly today, Google Earth Hacks has it, Virtual Globe Trotting has it, and Google Sightseeing has it. Not sure who was first, though, as attribution is scarce in the cut-throat world of Google Earth sightseeing:-) (Erm, picture on the left stolen from Virtual Globetrotting.)

Hitwise web analyst Bill Tancer has posted a league table for portals and how their respective properties rank. In search, for example, Google is first with 47.4% of all visits, followed by Yahoo! (16.0%) and MSN (11.5%).

Hitwise also has a “Travel – Maps” category, where Bill lists the following sites, ranked by visits as a percentage of the total segment:

1. Mapquest (56.3%)
2. Yahoo! Maps (20.5%)
3. Google Maps (7.5%)
4. MSN Virtual Earth (4.3%)
5. Google Earth (2.0%)

So, Google Earth users are like the Mac users of maps:-) Actually, I’m wondering how Hitwise measures that metric for Google Earth. Unless Google provides Hitwise with logon data, I don’t see how they can tell accurately how many people use Google Earth. Or does it mean that at any one time, 2% of map and travel site visitors are downloading the standalone Google Earth application from http://earth.google.com? That’d be quite a feat — the site doesn’t serve for much else. (I’m trying to find out.)

Is Google Earth’s imagery update schedule not frequent enough for you? Aerials Express now promises to deliver its most recent US city imagery directly as a dynamic network link in Google Earth. It’s beta, and it will be offered as premium content (=pay) but there is a free demo of six regions.

I can imagine that plenty of real estate agents would be willing to pony up for such content. The only problem: When I use the demo I get overlays that simultaneously seem unrelated to the area I’m looking at and of much lower resolution than what Google Earth already has. Sure it’s beta and all, but if you write a press release, that’s your one big chance to impress. Does it work for anyone else?

[Update 21:08 UTC: Frank Taylor emails to say it’s a Mac issue. Fair enough, as I’m on a Mac:-) But the moral of the story needs to be: If you’re a company developing for Google Earth, get yourself a Mac Mini for testing, or else tell us it hasn’t been tested on the Mac. Google Earth is a consumer GIS product.]

Here’s a quick catch-up post of interesting content related to Google Earth from the past few days. Regularly scheduled posting resumes Monday morning…

• The Times of India, to their credit, reports “Google satellite images no threat, says IAF chief“. Indian Air Force Chief Marshal S. P. Tyagi is a voice of reason. (Thanks to everyone who emailed me this:-)
• I’ve been following this thread on Google Earth Community with interest over the past week: “Reverse-engineering the Adidas Game“. (Don’t forget that some very nifty solutions to the one-way interaction problem were found back in August 2005 by Mickey when he first made the GEWar game.)
• Fantastic! A GeoRSS aggregator with search by area: Mapufacture, by Mikel Maron.
• Suw Charman writes up a talk by Mikel Maron about GeoRSS at Xtech 2006. Turns out there are more GeoRSS aggregators in the pipeline: Placedb, The GeoThingy, and FoF Redux.
• European hotel booking site Booking.com integrates Google Earth into its search results. Intuitive and seamless. (Via Roell.net)
• Import KML into open source 3D authoring tool Blender with this Python script. (Via BlenderNartion)
• Use Google Earth and SketchUp to present your architectural project, win a prize, as a Stanford team did with the Green Dorm.
• Microsoft makes its updated Virtual Earth imagery available as a plugin for NASA World Wind, reports Bull’s Rambles. The plugin includes a business finder, and hence a revenue opportunty, which explains why they would be willing to bear the bandwidth costs.

Keyhole co-founder and Second Life veteran Avi Bar-Zeev writes a long post that argues Google Earth has a long way to go before it approaches what we commonly imagine to be the metaverse. It’s all about making 3D content semantic, he says, and this means that:

What we really need is a new language of object representation that encapsulates and preserves form and function, aesthetics, style, meaning, and behavior, all tightly coupled and never discarded in the “art pipeline” until the object is finally rendered on your screen.

Needless to say, he alludes to working on something like it. Avi’s post is a great read, full of lucid ideas.

[I’m not really doing his post justice. My post on the differences between Second Life and Google Earth will have to wait until I’m back in Stockholm on Sunday.]