There’s more than meets the eye to the Google Maps update in Europe, French Google-centric blog Zorgloob has discovered. And Google Earth has benefited as well.

What they’ve found is that the back end for Google Maps and Earth is ready for prime time in Europe. As of the past weekend, for example, you can get directions between cities in most European countries, complete with trajectory. Some cities, like Brussels and Paris, already let you ask for directions to landmarks. The maps layer with roads isn’t activated yet in Maps, but the directions given name all the roads, and the Satellite layer works fine as a proxy.

Even better, the little “&output=kml” hack blogged yesterday works wonderfully for getting the same trajectory into Google Earth (Brussels to Paris in Google Earth, for example). You can also do these queries directly in Google Earth and get the same result. Of course, Google Earth already has the road layer that Zorgloob now expects Google Maps to get within days.

PS: Be careful with the ferries, though — don’t take the route between Dublin and Malmö (KML) literally:-)

• A Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaign aimed at a US audience uses a Google Earth file: An American Chernobyl? Meanwhile, here is the real thing.
• New blog on the block: GeoRSS Blog, monitoring the development of this emerging standard. (Convert GeoRSS to KML here. On the to-do list: A converter that returns a network link rather than a static file.)
• Two new GPS-to-KML converters on the Ogle Earth radar screen:
  • GEtrax (for Windows), which in addition to the plain vanilla converting also handles OziExplorer files, ham radio tracking data (via findu.com) and plot data live from a GPS device onto Google Earth. The author of the software writes, “The registered version of GEtrax is ten dollars (in US or Canadian funds).” Looks like Canadians are getting a discount, ay?
  • Greg Heppenstall’s Bungee is similar, but will let you upload KML placemarks as waypoints to your GPS device. USD $5.

Quiet Monday so far:

• Clickable Culture notes that Microsoft has bought property… in Second Life.
• Google Sightseeing notes that Google Earth’s data update from a while back is now also availanle in Google Maps. Among other things, this means that the Swedish spy base which I blogged two weeks ago, which was obscured behind a cloud in Google Earth but visible in Google Maps, is now also obscured behind the very same cloud. Win a few, lose a few…

A great hint from Nearby.co.uk‘s Barry Hunter on Google Earth Community: You can append “&output=kml” to any Google Maps URL to have Google return a placemark in a KML file that opens automatically in Google Earth. This appears to be an undocumented feature — Google Maps’ API pages don’t appear to have it.

For example, here where I live in Stockholm, more or less, in Google Maps.

That’s using the URL you get by clicking on “Link to this page” in Maps. Now here is where I live in Stockholm in Google Earth.

Barry’s suggested query format in his hint returns a more verbose page in Google Maps.

And if you append “&output=kml”, the KML returned is also more descriptive with a link back to the Maps version.

Experimenting a little, it turns out that by using Barry’s format, you can have Google Earth fly to any address or place name its database knows. For example, Berlin, Germany in Maps (look, no coordinates). Berlin, Germany in Google Earth (again, no coordinates).

I haven’t found a way to encode views in a query, so your Google Earth view is always from above.

What’s so new about this? Generating KML from a server query has certainly been done before — in fact, it was Ogle Earth’s very first mashup, back in July 2005 (direct link. You can also use it via yubnub.) The problem with running PHP off www.ogleearth.com is that it is not exactly scalable if everybody uses it. But appending “&output=kml” to Google Maps is.

Finally, the caveats: This method also still pollutes your desktop/download area with KML files, and it isn’t a “transparent” solution, in the sense that we’re mixing magisteria here, piggybacking on web protocols to get to Google Earth’s coordinate space. But it’s the closest yet to linking seamlessly from the web to Google Earth.

[Update 2006-04-25: Barry tells how he found this hack.]

[Update 2006-05-07: The hack gets its own javascript bookmarklet over here.]

• Earth Day for Google means a collaboration with Scholastic to set up lesson plans that use Google Earth, and also a contest for American 6-8th graders to create the best Google Earth file illustrating an environmental story. 30,000 teachers are getting a project poster, 100,000 more are being emailed. This is going to be huge:-)

In Japan, Sakura Mapping celebrates Earth day by encouraging people to send in snaps of the cherry blossoms in bloom via their mobile phone, and then mapping them live to Google Earth and Maps. (Via Seer)

• The Mac version of Google Earth is now at a new build, 3.1.0621.0 (beta), dated April 16. (The last version, 3.1.0617 (beta), was dated February 7.) I can’t see any difference, and the release notes are exactly the same, so I suspect it fixes some minor bugs. No, this version is not a universal binary.
• Time to start reading up on NASA World Wind “add-ons”. Here is a blog that tracks new ones, aptly called World Wind Add-ons. And here is a full list, on World Wind Central, a wonderful wiki.
• Golf Smarter, a free podcast about golf, now has its own companion network link that points to the golf courses that are covered in the show. Seeing this is what got me thinking about integrating podcasts with KML more closely, which led to the previous post.
• Dave Pentecost’s The Daily Glyph blog has a knack for turning new maps of ancient Central American civilizations into Google Earth overlays. Piedras Negras, Usumacinta River valley, more.
• Frank Taylor is right: An unheralded but totally awesome improvement to Google Earth in the last data update is the better place names, and how they are linked to Google searches in the pop-up. The image search is a definite time saver. And time waster.

VRCO senior software engineer Todd Yocum writes up his own development work much better than I ever could, so I’ll let this post write itself:

Saw your post about Tibet and the comment about GE and Snow Crash. I’m a big Stephenson fan myself, so thought it might interest you to know that my company is probably the closest there is to having GE in a Metaverse at the moment.

We have a product called Conduit that can take a normal OpenGL app and allow it to be rendered in 3D stereo in an immersive display. This is not your normal desktop stereo, this is wall-sized display, using head tracking to give the correct perspective based on the viewers head. As an added bonus, you can also use Conduit to navigate within a 3D view of Conduit. For example, from a pulled back view of New York with the 3D buildings, you can then fly through the streets of New York using a 6DOF tracker.

We demo’ed it publicly recently at the VR2006 conference, so its not really a secret, but Conduit for Google Earth is not a product or being distributed at this time either, so not a lot of press for it. We are shipping Conduit for StudioTools, which we announced at VR2006 and also demo’ed.

Fun stuff, and it was pretty well received at VR2006 as far as demos go.

Here is the Conduit site, not a lot there visually unfortunately, mostly tech stuff.

And here is out sister site, Fakespace, which makes the killer VR displays. Not quite Snow Crash for usability yet, but probably the next best thing, depending on what your criteria is.

To which I can only add: Todd, please put up a web video of this in action.

I got to thinking today as to whether there might be ways to integrate podcasts with Google Earth, so that you could narrate a trip, for example, and have Google Earth show you precisely what it is you’re talking about, while you’re talking about it.

It turns out that you can, if you use some of the more advanced features that podcasts have these days — namely, chapters, and the ability to link chapters to URLs. The trick is linking to a KML file instead of an HTML file. It works perfectly, and I’ve made a proof of concept.

Some caveats, of course. This looks best in iTunes (Windows or Mac), though it also works in QuickTime (Windows or Mac) and in embedded QuickTime web objects. [Update: WIndows users will need the very latest QuickTime install.] ]If you use another client, I don’t think you will see the clickable links. The file is the newer .m4a format, which lets you embed metadata. I used Apple’s GarageBand to record my voice, create chapters, add the URLs, URL titles, and image thumbnails. Your mileage may vary with other authoring tools, but you can also do all this manually. All these enhancements are on the cusp of going mainstream.

The best way to see how this works is to just download the podcast file to iTunes, or else watch the Podcast as an embedded web object — it’s less than two minutes long. It also helps to already have Google Earth up and running. (This works very well, BTW, from within Google Earth’s own web browser.)

When links appear at the bottom of the podcast “art”, click on them to fetch the KML file. If your browser is already trained to open KML files automatically in Google Earth, then you’re fine. Otherwise, you’ll have to point it there. Tip: Once in Google Earth, click on the placemark to see the full-size view of the photographs I’m discussing.

No, you can’t script Google Earth so that the podcast can instruct it to fly to places automatically.

There are some rough edges with something this new: The KML files are first saved to your downloaded folder/desktop, so it gets a bit littered there eventually. And it would also be simpler if we could download just one big KML file and then link to specific placemarks or layer views within it, in a manner similar to how we can append “#element-name” to HTML documents to access elements within an HTML document. (Best of all, of course, would be that we could write anchor tags that link directly to locations and views inside Google Earth. But that’s another story.)

[Update 22:47 UTC: One last thing: You’re not restricted to just placemarks. You could also link to 3D models and have yourself a very cool architecture podcast, for example.]