Google’s strategy for populating its Earth with 3D textured buildings has just gotten a lot sharper — literally (ha). If you download the newest build, 4.0.2722, the default layers have now started to show this:

What you get is the best of 3D Warehouse‘s textured buildings uploaded by users, downloaded by default as you zoom in. Smartly, if such buildings are located in spots where gray untextured “placeholder” buildings have been available by default, these have disappeared in favor of the new improved version. Here’s downtown New York with just the 3D Warehouse best-of buildings:

Here’s the same view with the placeholders added:

As speculated on Ogle Earth before, and now confirmed, Google is harnessing the creativity of its users to populate its Earth with 3D textured buildings, whereas Microsoft Virtual Earth is engaging in “central planning”, with a concerted effort to map 3D textures onto models using technology from its recent acquisitions. Which is quicker and/or better will become apparent over time.

But what happens when a user deletes a contributed building from 3D Warehouse? I went looking for the answer in the terms of service, and the answer is quite clear (I think): Although you own your content, uploading it to 3D Warehouse gives Google a “perpetual license” to reproduce both the content and derivative works of the content, even if you later remove it from your account. In other words, Google Earth won’t suddenly see its textured buildings go AWOL. Below the fold, the exact wording of the relevant bits of the terms of service…

PS. If you want to see all current 3D Warehouse content, including on older builds of Google Earth, you can still download the 3D Warehouse network link.

[Update 2006-01-08: Flying around some more, it’s clear that in several cities at least, a good portion of the textured buildings are credited to Google, so it looks like Google’s strategy is flexible, filling in the gaps where user content isn’t available.]

Continue reading 3D Warehouse now a Google Earth default layer →

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Pict’Earth, a remarkable system flagged by Frank that transmits live aerial photography from an unmanned flying drone to a computer on the ground, where it is georeferenced and served to Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer clients in real time.

It sounds almost too good to be true, but it’s legit. Fabrice Fasquel and David Riallant are French GIS pros. A third listed contact, Thierry Rousselin has his own GIS blog, Géo 212.

So how does it all work? Before live integration with Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer came along, there was Le Cyclope, a flying drone for taking aerial digital photography, guided remotely by a human via a live video downlink. First developed in 2000, a lot of the technical information is available in French (alas in Flash) on the site of the company that created the kit, Visions du Ciel. What follows are the technical highlights, translated.

The drone weights 2.5 kg, and can fly up to a height of 300 meters and within a circumference of 1 km, at least within the law in France. It’s velocity is between 3-25 km/h, and the engine is electric, with a battery charge that is enough for 15 minutes of flight. The effective resolution of the captured imagery is 4 centimeters per pixel at a height of 150 meters with a 5 megapixel camera. The live video is relayed via a 2.4 Ghz transmitter to a receiver in the field, connected to a laptop or to the pilot’s video goggles.

The drone is very versatile — instead of capturing imagery, it could be made to capture georeferenced temperatures, humidity, luminosity, pollution or radioactivity, on demand, depending on the installed receptor.

To see it in action, there is a video to download (zipped Quicktime) on the site, different from the one Frank found on Google Video.

If you want to buy one, here are the complete technical specifications as a PDF. The price, alas, is only available on demand. (I’ve asked, in the meantime:-) Visions du Ciel also offers a processing service for images captured with the Cyclope, which includes georeferencing and stitching, with a turnaround time of 12-24 hours. Prices here too are on demand.

But what, then, is Pict’Earth? For this new technology, the specifics are not as detailed. From Visions du Ciel‘s product site (alas also in Flash), it is clear that it Pict’Earth adds a layer of functionality to the Cyclope drone by transmitting the photographic imagery it captures, along with GPS data, live to the ground, where it is processed and collated in real time and served in a format readable to Google Earth and ESRI ArcGIS Explorer. It’s not clear whether this format is a simple KML network link, but I suspect it is. As the site makes clear, the intention is to let an analysis team give Cyclope’s pilot live instructions based on the photography being transmitted in real time.

It would be great to see a live demo of this (again, I’ve asked) because I imagine the real tour-de-force lies in the automated real-time georeferencing and stitching of the transmitted photography. If that can really be done at a high level of quality, then I will be impressed, as it strikes me as a particularly difficult task to automate. Perhaps the live transmission of imagery is only intended as an initial first draft, with proper processing after the flight.

In any case, this is a wonderful innovation. Beachfront celebrity weddings will never be safe from paparazzi again:-)

As James Fee noted, a new version of ESRI ArcGIS Explorer Beta is available — build 350, up from build 348. As detailed by the changelog, new in this version are options to use the MGRS and US National Grid coordinate systems:

Preferences for clouds and lighting have been moved from the “Options” pane to a “Map Properties” pane, and these settings are now saved with each globe’s .NMF file, rather than with the application.

You can now also paste a URL link to a KML file to add it to ArcGIS Explorer, though KML support doesn’t appear to have improved — you still can’t see pop-up windows for placemarks, for example.

Otherwise, the criticisms from last week’s review have yet to be remedied — zooming to a placemark still avoids the dateline, the default cloud view is a placeholder, and imagery, labels and borders download slowly.

There’s a (mostly) bugfix edition of Google Earth out, version 4.0.27xx Beta, with a build date of January 5. The changelog notes the following:

KML Notes:

• <Update> no longer produces error messages when the “Show prompts for all errors” option is used

Major Fixes:

• Improved performance and stability with large number of collada models
• Mac specific bug for time data being shown incorrectly
• All urls in description are now automatically converted to hyperlinks (wrap description with <html>…</html> to avoid this)

Thanks to Teacher’s Lounge blog for flagging this: In response to 2007’s Edge Annual Question thrown out to some of the world’s leading thinkers, “What are you optimistic about?”, Google’s Chris Dibona shows he totally groks the ongoing democratization of access to high resolution imagery of the earth:

Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It

I am not so much of a fool to think that war will end, no matter how much I wish that our shared future could include such a thing. Nor do I think that people will stop the careless destruction of flora and fauna for personal, corporate, national or international gain. I do believe that the advent of rapidly updating, citizenry-available high resolution imagery will remove the protection of the veil of ignorance and secrecy from the powerful and exploitative among us.

Read the whole thing.

• Google Earth technical writer John Gardiner has written a FAQ that explains how you too can contribute to Google Earth’s geographic web, either via Wikipedia or Panoramio.
• Garmin is introducing a GPS dog tracking system at the Consumer Electronics Show. Yes, it outputs to Google Earth. It seems aimed at hunters and their dogs… But why stop at dogs? This thing should work great with cats, raccoons, model airplanes, people under house arrest and children. I’m only half kidding.
• How to serve KML with GeoServer.

I’m back in Cambridge for the weekend, getting IPY.org out the door. In the meantime, here’s some commentary on my airport reading:

Andrew Hudson-Smith points to an article/op-ed piece in the Guardian (where he is quoted) that laments the copyright squabbles that are keeping a 3D building layer of London out of Google Earth:

Google was equally enthusiastic and approached the university about incorporating Virtual London into its city maps.

At the moment, London boroughs can use Virtual London under licences they have with Ordnance Survey [OS] and Infoterra, which supplied the Lidar data. What nobody can do is put the model on the web for all to see. Google’s approach “led to some discussion between OS and Google”.

However, these discussions appear to have reached an impasse. The sticking point is understood to be Google’s attempt to negotiate a fixed fee for the data, rather than accepting Ordnance Survey’s practice of charging by the number of transactions. Ordnance Survey would not comment on the specific case, but said that a fixed fee would “wreck the level playing field for other partners” – and it should be noted that it is obliged to treat all customers (including itself) on the same terms. OS said it is happy for its data to be used in a “Google-type” environment. “Sites such as Multimap and Streetmap use our data and their services are freely available to the public over the web.”

[…]The impasse illustrates the difficulty faced by Ordnance Survey in adapting its licensing policies for the new age.

When GIS was a specialized field, pay per use wouldn’t bankrupt anyone, nor make anyone rich. But when the number of potential users for this data reaches the hundreds of millions, then it really is time to come up with another model for rewarding innovation, especially when the cost of duplicating content asymptotically approaches zero. In other words, OS’s other partners are also being overcharged, now that the data in question is ready for mainstream consumption.

Interestingly, (I know, I’m using that word too much of late) the article is part of a wider campaign by the Guardian to make tax-payer funded data free to all. But Google wasn’t even asking for free data — it just wanted a licensing model that can scale with the rising popularity of geobrowsers.

Contrast all this with a recent more successful model for collaboration: NASA giving its raw data away in return for help from Google in processing it and serving it. Perhaps the Ordinance Survey and Google could try out something more creative along those lines — could OS use some time or room on Google’s server farms for some projects, perhaps? Surely some Google technology would be of use to OS in some kind of barter deal?

(Malicious afterthought: There must be a fixed cost to getting this data for oneself, without OS’s help. Perhaps Google could collaborate with open-source initiatives like OpenStreetMap to obtain a duplicate set, and then there would be no need to for anyone to license this data from OS anymore. This prospect in turn might drive OS to make a fixed-cost deal.)