Harry’s car doesn’t fly, but he sure makes a convincing case for having found it in Google Earth, parked in the Pennines (UK).
All posts by Stefan Geens
KML Writer: Unleash your inner Trump
I’ve just had way too much fun playing with KML Writer, a poor man’s Google Earth authoring tool. Just draw a polygon by clicking away in the Google Maps interface, add the amount of extrusion in meters, and export the result as a KML file that opens right away in Google Earth. You can even combine different polygons into one KML file. And it’s free.
One obvious use is making instant skyscrapers that really give free rein to your inner Trump. Here is my vision for Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, New York, circa 2016: Ogle Earth Towers (KML), a 300-meter high medium-income housing project to alleviate the housing shortage there. There’s always Central Park for those who need parks, though imagine the size of the things you could build in Central Park!
KML Writer is by Simple Spatial Solutions, a Canadian outfit.
Weekend brainstorms
Time spent with Google Earth seems to have led to some interesting bainstorming among certain bloggers…
Londoner Dan Hill of City of Sound wishes for the ability to browse through time and to listen to sounds in Google Earth. As for the former, a time browser is coming — KML has (undocumented) time tags and a time browser has already been demonstrated in public by Google Earth CTO Michael Jones. As for the latter… I don’t know of any existing layer that links up to soundscape files, but this is something that’s trivial to make these days. Anyone have a library of such files, georeferenced? It’d be a cool project, certainly if connected to some kind of georeferenced QuickTime VR library for the complete immersive experience.
Alan Glennon moots a camera or camera setup that would not only record coordinates, but also its tilt and heading, importable into Google Earth via the <LookAt> tag. (Hey, why we’re at it, why not give Google Earth a zoom slider, just like a camera lens… No, not really.) He calls it “geovantaging”. Quite serendipitously, last Friday saw the release of GETrackr, which lets you geotag photos with exactly this kind of information, albeit manually, in Google Earth, in the absence of such cameras existing.
(An aside: Imagine for a moment that such cameras become ubiquitous. You could then use them en masse to “paint” the sides of Google Earth’s currently matte gray 3D virtual buildings with their real surfaces. Digitally Distributed Environments has a demo up of this technique, using Microsoft Local’s bird’s eye view painted onto a 3D example. The one tricky bit: the camera lens’s angle of view (wide angle to tele-lens) would have to be the same as Google Earth’s or else automatically adjusted via software when used.)
Alasdair Allan at The Daily Ack takes Alan’s ideas and wonders, what else could the camera do while taking the picture? He proposes some automatic data mining about the location you’re at, and perhaps live uploading to the net, viewable in Google Earth.
Meanwhile, Italian Cristian Contini has a picture up of when dinosaurs roamed the Google Earth.
[Update 21:11 UTC: Forgot to add a link to a post I had in mind for the brainstorming theme: Webby nominated World Changing blog asked its readers what else they’d like to see portrayed in Google Earth, and they got a load of suggestions back.]
Mologogo goes Google Earth
Late last year Mologogo began offering the ability to let you use your GPS/Java phone to share your position with friends, either to their Java phone or to a Google Map. Besides being free, it apparently also just works, as this Make: review testified to.
And now they’ve gone Google Earth. First, it was a PHP script that you could run on your own server, which you could then use to power a network link. Not everybody has access to a server, so it’s good news that you can now get any public user’s 100 latest points as a KML file, via this page.
Note, however, that what you get returned is a file that opens as a static file in Google Earth. If you want to get the URL for the dynamically created file to wrap inside a network link, hack the sample link provided ÇƒÓ basically, it’s
http://mologogo.ilovemygeek.com/molokml.php?user=gravitymonkey
where gravitymonkey is a public user’s name, which you can replace at will. It seems to work well, though the resulting KML is a set of waypoints, not a path; a path would definitely help in determining the waypoints’ sequence.
GETrackr lets you add view geotags to Flickr & Co.
Rob Roy, previously of FlickrFly and UKAutumnColour fame, has now come up with GETrackr, a dead simple way of generating geotags and views for Flickr and other geotag-savvy web apps.
At the moment, GETrackr is an adjunct of sorts to Mark Zeman’s FlickrMap geotagger — able to add the view tags (which FlickrMap can’t) but not fully integrated with the browser (which FlickrMap is). Rob writes that GETrackr’s functionality will soon be added to FlickrMap, but that GETrackr is a good stop-gap solution. Stop gap or no, this is one of the simplest and most intuitive geotaggers I’ve seen, so that alone might be enough for many. (Ogle Earth’s review of FlickrMap.)
(The installation instructions tell you to use the built-in browser, which might flummox Mac users. My Mac was able to use GETrackr without problems in FireFox externally, though.)
Finally a way to justify Google Earth at the office
Brian Timoney of Timoney Group might think he is just engaging in some clever viral marketing when he releases demos of how he can help companies portray data in Google Earth, but this time he may just have come up with the best argument yet to justify installing Google Earth at the office, should your IT department have nixed the idea until now: You need it for financial analysis.
We’ve seen Google Earth used for geography, science, to illustrate historical events and as a social tool. Now it’s also an economic tool, as this network link of Latin American trade patterns makes clear. And there is some clever use of hovering involved. I love it.
[Update 21:51 UTC: Cory Eicher at Eicher-GIS.com deserves equal credit with Brian Timoney for this work.]
An Earth for Google Talk
If you use Google Talk (or Jabber) and are social by nature, Talk Maps lets you advertise your status and location on Google Maps. it’s based on a clever hack: You add a bot to your friends list, so that it knows when you are available, and you also enter your coordinates on a special form once. Bingo, yet another way to meet new people from all over the world.
The reason it’s mentioned here, of course, is that Talk Maps now also boasts Google Earth integration. It’s a smart use of technology, but my inner misantrope wishes this could be restricted to just my friends. Perhaps have Google Earth fly to wherever a friend comes online, for example, if it’s not busy. Such integration between Google Talk and Earth is definitely one way in which Google Pack could be made to look more like a pack and less like a collection.