Tim Beerman has been blogging the impending release of his Shape2Earth plugin for MapWindow, an open source GIS viewer. Here is some eyecandy of converted Shapefiles made with Shape2Earth, which is currently being beta-tested. Here is a walkthrough of a typical process for converting Shapefiles into Google Earth.
Now that Google Earth has high-resolution data for Germany, it’s worth building 3D structures on top of it. Behold Bamberg Cathedral, on Google Earth Hacks.
Google Earth Blognotes some further undocumented improvements to the dataset for Google Earth, as listed by an eagle-eyed Google Earth Community member. Checking Kampala (Uganda), it is now indeed in high resolution (which it wasn’t when last I visited just over a week ago) and — with less certainty now — large strips in South Africa have gone high resolution, which I don’t believe were there before. It is great to see the developing world, including India, being given a higher priority in the data updates.
GPSLodgereports on the new Navman GPS devices out today, whose main distinguishing feature is a 1.3 megapixel camera. Nothing to write home about, camera-wise, but surely this “gadget mashup” is the leading edge of a trend? It should result in far more georeferenced content showing up on Flickr et. al. sometime soon. (On the other extreme end of the georeferenced photo product spectrum is the new Nikon D200, which can optionally connect to a GPS device via a cable to have it fed geodata into a photograph’s metadata.)
I’m in Switzerland for a week on vacation, so posting will be sporadic, depending on how close the cybercafés are to the ski slopes. And how the global warming is progressing. Meanwhile,
View the Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race live in Google Earth, using the same technology as the Sydney Hobart race from a couple of months ago. The race starts on April 1. (Press release.)
Geoff Zeiss provides further coverage of Map Middle East 2006 in Dubai, including on Google Earth CTO Michael Jones’s speech.
Mapki is a wiki that aggregates developer tools, tutorials, and code for Google’s Map API. Among other things, it contains KMLMap, a code snippet that lets you add placemarks from a KML document onto your Google Map.
A great overview (with cool workflow chart) of the tools available for a typical GIS project, by GIS for Archaeology and CRM.
Ed Parsons writes up a talk by Google Earth CTO Michael Jones at the Map Middle East Conference in Dubai. A must read for those trying to divine what Google is up to (buzz words are “a sense of place” and “user-focused”). Jones also cited the tricorder as an inspiration for Google Earth, in the sense that both could/should provide all the relevant information about a local space.
MA student “Jemalaska”, in/from Craig, Alaska, has posted a KMZ file to Google Earth Hacks that manages to be innovative in two wonderful ways. The first involves some clever social engineering:
My professor allowed me to submit a GE tour instead of a paper.
The second involves importing documentary photographs into Google Earth simply by placing them onto the surface of the Earth as overlays. There is plenty of flat space to do this — for example where the oceans are, but even on land the terrain doesn’t cause problems if viewing from directly above, or away from mountains (or with terrain turned off).
I think this wholly unintended use of Google Earth’s overlay tool works well. There is something quite natural about scrolling past pictures plastered onto a sphere, and of course many traditional maps use illustrations in exactly the same manner. I’ve just never seen it in Google Earth until now.
A recent post on a bulletin board (I can’t remember where) claimed that Google Earth Enterprise Client already has the fabled time browser built in — it’s just that none of us have used Enterprise Client as it is part of an industrial-strength solution that is most certainly not free.
I couldn’t find any mention of a time browser on the product page, so I asked Google Earth’s director of engineering Brian McClendon if the time browser exists. Here is what he wrote back:
GE-EC (the client software) does have a time menu that adds an additional visiblity filter based on a animatable slider.
But Brian says that it isn’t ready for prime time yet; this means we’ll need to wait before it arrives in other versions of Google Earth.
CadalystAEC polls industry insiders as to what’s in store for SketchUp and Google Earth. It’s an interesting read.
Arab News has a balanced article about Google Earth, security and privacy. The main focus is on privacy, with some interesting local color, and all viewpoints are represented. In fact, it is Google that comes out with a rather weak defence:
Eileen Rodriguez with Google Corporate Communications, told Arab News: “We have not received a request to decrease the resolution of imagery of Saudi Arabia. […]”
The Daily Grazenotes a neologism coined at a Game Developers’ Conference roundtable last week: “M3S”, which stands for “Massive Multi-player MySpace”, such as Second Life, and which will be populated with SketchUp content, of course. (Aside: What are new acronyms called? neocronyms?)
[Virtual Globes] are quickly becoming the new paradigm in earth science, earth science education and outreach, earth science logistics, and earth science data access. This conference is interested addressing questions such as: How are these tools currently being used in earth sciences? How do they work? How have they changed earth sciences? What needs of earth sciences are currently not being met by the existing tools? What should we expect for the future and what role should we play in it?
Register here. The venue is the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences facilities, and it appears to be free of charge.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
