All posts by Stefan Geens

Content

Waterworld

After an excellent read on virtual globes in the current issue of Nature, I chanced upon some very interesting comments appended to Declan’s blog post. One of them points to GeoMapApp, a cross-platform Java geobrowser linked to reams of detailed seafloor height data, but also historical seismicity, and more.

What’s immensely useful is that any view at any resolution is exportable as a KMZ layer ready for opening in Google Earth, letting you see far more detailed bathymetry data than Google Earth currently displays by default.

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Google Earth CTO Michael Jones has hinted that 3D ocean mapping is on a to-do list of possible future enhancements, so consider this to be a (2D) sneak preview of things to come. But GeoMapApp is an impressive application in its own right, especially if you look at some of the focus areas and the analytical tools you get play with there.

Content

Virtual planet of the apes

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The Jane Goodall Institute’s new Gombe Chimpanzee Blog posts its entries exclusively to Google Earth. The action takes place in western Tanzania, on the densely forested slopes facing Lake Tanganyika.

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Remarkably, over seven months after the launch of Google Earth, this is the first blog I know of to jump in at the deep end in this way. You can certainly make the case that when it comes to blogging a creature as territorial as the chimpanzee, where the action happens is a crucial piece of context. (Via Googlers’ Blogs)

Process

World-wide widgets

This is not going to work if everyone releases one, but being early-to-market with a Google Earth-themed widget still warrants a mention, especially if it’s goodlooking:

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This one is for Mac OS X, and it’s basically just an RSS reader for the Google Sightseeing website — there are no direct links to Google Earth file downloads, instead the widget links to the relevant post on the blog.

(In fact, it turns out Chris Homan made a Yahoo! widget for Google Earth Hacks back in August, which also just lists the latest articles.)

I’m not sure if this kind of widget is going to stay on my screen, as real estate is scarce and there are plenty of RSS feeds to follow.

However, it just occurred to me that the Yahoo! widget engine could be put to some very interesting use, Google Earth-wise, because it can be configured to float widgets above all other windows. This should allow us to bypass the elongated sprawl that my Google Earth Places panel often becomes, to focus on specific content, tidily presented. Why not have small widgets with direct KML content feeds? Here is a great candidate: Tremorskimmer. Clicking on a specific earthquake could — should — bring us there in Google Earth:

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Or why not have a widget that rotates random geotagged Flickr photos? Click on the picture, go to the location. This geocaching widget is practically there: Instead of linking to Google Maps, it could link to Google Earth by generating the relevant KML file and having it open in Google Earth.

it would be even nicer, of course, if these widgets could read Google Earth’s current field of view, and return relevant information that you’re interested in — for example return a weather forecast for a spot at the center of your screen. That might be for a future version, but clearly there is a lot of potential here. Widgets could turn out to be the best way to navigate the labyrinthine layers of Google Earth’s panels — and a wonderful opportunity to integrate Google Earth with Google Desktop, perhaps? (And note how ESRI ArcGIS Explorer uses widget-like and tool-bar like objects to keep its GUI user-friendly.)

Reviews

Google Earth, cover model

cover_nature.jpgI’m off to read a whole slew of articles on mass mapping, virtual globes and in particular Google Earth in this week’s edition of Nature , but I thought you might like to know now and get started yourself. Declan Butler, who wrote many of them and snagged some great interviews at both Google and ESRI, introduces the week’s issue on his blog, and links to the articles directly. They are all on free access, and I suspect this is something we can thank Declan for.

[Update: 22:27 UTC: Kathryn Cramer already has her take out.]

Uncategorized

Curious quote

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An article in Asia Times Online covers Google’s entry into the Indian marketplace, both as a moneymaking enterprise and as an employer. It quotes Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google’s vice president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations, thus:

“The market in India is changing rapidly,” she told the media. “More people are coming online as the infrastructure for growth expands quickly. We are making certain changes in Google Earth so that the safety and other concerns of various governments could be addressed.”

Is that a misquote, or is she signalling a further shift in the extent to which Google will hobble content in return for access to markets? What other possible interpretation is there?

Content

Maya 2 Google Earth (!)

Google Earth is about to be run over by monsters, because what was an extreme hack just two weeks ago has now matured into a smooth-as-silk plugin for Alias/Autodesk’s Maya, that $2,000 3D authoring tool so beloved by special effects people.

It’s called Maya 2 Google Earth, a free open source tool by Eyebeam, the people that came up with the original Ogle 3D extraction utility.

In a fit of hope, I downloaded Maya’s free personal learner edition, thinking that it might work with Maya2GE, but alas I was thwarted at the last step, so it remains a toy for those in the business. (As a silver lining, though, this means that the monsters will be of a certain quality:-)

The rest of us can still make our own 3D eyecandy with the KML examples supplied on the Maya2GE site. Here’s a screenshot of a dragon rampaging through Chinatown:

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Of course, Maya is good for much more than importing games characters — the immersive world Second Life is founded on Maya, so suddenly these two worlds have gotten a lot closer in terms of showing each other’s content. And exporting from Maya to Google Earth will allow the wholesale replacement of central business districts with more detailed architecture.

Eyebeam’s Theo Watson writes that he’s hoping for volunteers to supply a Godzilla to rampage through Japan. I’m still holding out for a King Kong on the Empire State Building, meanwhile.

[Update 21:22 UTC: Got questions? Head on over to the Maya2GE forum.]