Spaceref.com now reports:

Editor’s update: While this [collaboration] announcement will still happen, NASA ARC PAO now says it has been delayed until a date that has been “mutually agreed upon by NASA and Google.”

As for what this announcement will be about, Romyn in the comments makes a good case for it being iEarth, as written up by New Scientist:

Called iEarth, the NASA software scours EOS databanks for information and converts it into a file that can be viewed via Google Earth. Choosing a spot on the planet’s surface will prompt iEarth to display ground-based measurements for that location, as well as data relating to the atmosphere and space above it.

It’s due in April, says NASA. Maybe Google didn’t want to pre-announce, or else iEarth is being rebranded YouEarth:-) (Via tobedetermined!)

[Update 20:56 UTC: Keith Cowing’s “Editor’s update” on NASA Watch is even better:

While this announcement will still happen, NASA ARC PAO now says it has been delayed until a date that has been “mutually agreed upon by NASA and Google.”. ARC PAO”s Laura Lewis also chided me for posting an internal memo. I guess it did not occur to her that sending an email to several thousand people about a “kick off event” is tantamount to announcing it publicly since the memos get forwarded almost instantly. Indeed, that’s the point of such widely distributed emails in the first place – messages that carry no admonition about further dissemination.

Moral of the story: Don’t ever, ever tell bloggers anything that is not for blogging without telling them it is not for blogging:-)]

This sounds exciting: A media advisory for Friday Dec 15 has Google and NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) announcing a new kind of collaboration. SpaceRef.com has some hints as to what this entails (but doesn’t get specific):

Among other things, the collaboration will focus on an agency-wide project whereby NASA imagery and data will be translated into formats that will facilitate its wider distribution outside the agency. […] Among the details of this new cooperative project, Google will be contributing funding to support NASA employees – and not just at ARC – but at other NASA centers as well.

I have no idea what this announcement will be about, but I can make wild guesses. Do note that Google Earth is due an update — the last couple of updates have been six weeks apart, and the last one was six weeks ago. Also, NASA Ames specializes not just in aerial imagery but also in Mars and Lunar imagery. And NASA has now begun offering aerial imagery as KML. So either we get a much deeper integration of NASA images in Google Earth, or we get a virtual globe for Mars (which disappeared when Google bought Keyhole) or the moon. Or I’m just overexcited. (Via Search Engine Land)

Adil Yoltay writes in about CitySurf, a free 3D viewer from Turkey:

We are 3 developers have started 2 years ago CitySurf Project and it will be finished nearly. CitySurf free OpenGL-based viewer, which connects to servers for streaming of content, elevation, imagery, road outlines, 3D buildings, points of interest, etc. (like google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth concepts but faster then others).

A Youtube video of the app in action is quite impressive, showing plenty of textured 3D models:

They presented at Cebit 2006 Istanbul, and made it to Turkish CNN — video snippet here.

You can download the application, and I gave it a quick run. Everything is in Turkish, but you can easily guess which buttons do what. The interface looks a lot like Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer, with layers for points of interest located in Turkish cities. Labels and roads are vector-based (nice), navigation is snappy, and some of the 3D buildings have very high resolution textures — the highest I’ve seen in a 3D viewer. This is put to good use in a few streets to allow actual window shopping, though I’m not sure how well this would scale. Finally, CitySurf isn’t an actual virtual globe (i.e., a sphere), but a viewer for rendering a specific area of terrain.

Click to enlarge

• Now you can see what Mount Saint Helens looked like before it blew its top in 1980, courtesy of Simon Seamount, a graduate student at Michigan State University. It comes with a nifty timeline — drag it past the explosion date, and you’ll see the old shape of the mountain as a translucent 3D shape draped above the current outline.
• I don’t think I’ve mentioned this newish Google Earth blog before — Google Earth Users Guide Project, funded by the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, with the intention of helping teachers to use Google Earth in the classroom.
• Each year, MacWorld announces the Eddy Awards, the editors’ choice awards for the best products to come out for the Mac universe during the past year. This year, Google Earth makes the list. It was released for the Mac in January this year, remember.
• Gizmodo reports that the slick-looking Suunto GPS sports watch now also has software for uploading your tracks to Google Earth.
• Interesting innovation from Virtual Earth, merging the desktop with the mobile phone: Send directions from your home computer to your phone. No matter how fancy your mobile phone gets, it unlikely to ever sport a biggers screen than your desktop screen. (US only)
• The Earth is Square brings news that GeoServer 1.4.0 is out. It comes with better KML support.

You knew it had to happen sooner or later, but so soon? Check out this demo of J. Coulston’s WiiGoogleEarth.PIE script for GlovePIE, which lets you control Google Earth with the Wiimote using gestures:

Now you’ve got that perfect excuse to go get a Wii. (Via Digg) This hack adds the Wiimote to a growing list of controllers used to steer virtual globes. Previously, there was:

Illuminated ping pong balls to steer Google Earth (Atlas Gloves)

Salling Clicker to steer Google Earth via bluetooth

Sony PSP to steer NASA World Wind

XBox controller to steer Virtual Earth 3D

And of course 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator, though this device is in a league of its own — it’s got six degrees of freedom, and gradiations of movement. Talking of which, check out this user’s feedback on the SpaceNavigator, from a comment attached to the review:

On the strength of this review, I treated myself to a space navigator. I can’t begin to explain how awesome this thing is. After first installing it, I spent the next eight hours google earth – so much so that my eyes began to hurt, I was transfixed.

Maybe they should put some health warnings on the packaging:-)

With the pre-Christmas work rush in full swing, it’s more bulleted news, I’m afraid:

• Mappic is a georeferenced photo sharing site, sort of like Panoramio, with a network link for its photos. And it also seems to have some very nice pics. (Via this Google Earth Community post)
• Raoul at ComeAcross asks why Zoomr wasn’t included in Google Earth’s “Geographic web” instead of Panoramio, and the comments thread leads off into a discussion about who was “first” and what it means. The obvious solution, in the medium term, is to include all serious georeferenced photosharing sites that want to have a presence.

  I see the biggest potential problem for Panoramio (and sites like it) being spammers, as spammers might be tempted by the site’s exposure on Google Earth to try to pepper it with photo spam. This is possibly a reason why Panoramio’s default layer in Google Earth isn’t live — first, get the dedicated users to weed the submissions. (BTW, you can still get the live network link at Panoramio.)

  In the medium term, then, Google Earth’s “geographic web” layer could becomes something akin to Yahoo!’s early days, when it was a pre-sorted directory of all interesting web content. But pretty quickly the “ordinary” web grew too large, and so will the “geographic web”. In the long run, then, we’ll need the equivalent of Google search for the geographic web, with all the KML content out there being crawled and made available on Google Earth depending on the context.

• It’s remarkable, too, how much the mainstream tech media has finally been catching on to the “geographic web” meme in the aftermath of these two new layers being released. Take this ZDNet post, for example. Regular users of Google Earth have had access to Panoramio and Wikipedia content for over a year, along with a whole host of other feeds, but it is only when Google made these social, user-generated sites default layers that the implications of Google Earth as a geobrowser hit home more widely. The lesson should be clear from the strength of the response: Much more of where that came from, please. It’s time for the mainstream to be shown what the early adopters have been playing with.
• Coming to a Google Earth near you soon: a KML version of FortiusOne’s GeoIQ heatmaps (blogged about previously here). So says Chris on the FortiusOne blog.
• An intriguing new Microsoft technology: WPF/E. What is it? In marketingese, it’s
  

  the Microsoft solution for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond. Utilizing a subset of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)-based Windows Presentation Foundation technology, “WPF/E” will enable the creation of content and applications that run within multiple browsers and operating systems (Windows and Macintosh) using Web standards for programmability.

  Yay for crossplatform browser compatibility. The immediate question that comes to mind is: Will this eventually work with 3D? And does this mean that Virtual Earth 3D will come to the Mac? And if it will, does this mean a change of tactics for Microsoft, from luring customers to its platform through Windows-only solutions (as is the case now) to luring developers to its platform through Windows-only solutions because the developers know their products can be experienced on any computer? That latter strategy would make a lot more sense, I feel. (Via Coding Day)

• Windows Live Spaces pinpoints the exact places where Virtual Earth’s bird’s eye views were added in last week’s update.
• And now for some eye candy:
  • Frank Taylor’s found a beauty: The Turning Torso tower in southern Sweden is a gorgeous piece of architecture, and as imposing in Google Earth as it is in real life, especially as there is nothing tall anywhere near it.
  • Frank also takes us to a large repository of NASA timelapse imagery, converted to KML.
  • Declan Butler has updated his flu map.
  • Digitally Distributed Environments posts a video of some early 3D output from a freeware application Andrew Smith and his team are working on to convert SHP files to KML.
  • DIY Choropleth mapping: Noel Jenkins over on Juicy Geography uses R. Sgrillo’s GE Graph in combination with some readymade polygons and data to build a simple choropleth map, and writes up the experience. Useful for anyone who wants to make presentations that blow the competition away.

What’s in store for 2007? Public-private partnerships that involve Google popularizing access to cutting-edge technology. Here’s a telling preview, just off the wires:

Pennsylvania Governor Rendell Announces Pioneering Technology Venture to Promote State Tourism
Public-Private Partnership Will Allow World to Experience Pa’s Civil War Heritage

HARRISBURG, Pa., Dec. 11 /PRNewswire/ — Governor Edward G. Rendell today announced that Pennsylvania will become the first state in the nation to capitalize on the Google Earth platform by using a new, cutting-edge technology to make tourism an interactive experience from anywhere in the world.

The Governor said the state will provide a $285,000 grant to support an unprecedented partnership between Google Earth, Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office and the National Civil War Museum that will allow ‘virtual tourists’ from all corners of the globe to immerse themselves in Pennsylvania’s Civil War trails.

A bit further down in the press release, we find out what the intended end product is supposed to do. Says the governor:

Those who use this technology could see a panoramic view along a trail, zoom in to read the inscription on a Civil War monument, or go back in time to witness the change of seasons on a historic battlefield.

That’s quite a tall order, but we can assume that he isn’t making this up, as we soon get some more hints about the technology behind this:

Google Earth technology provides for a visual display of information about a specific location. Building on this platform, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office will incorporate a new technology developed through the Global Connections Project, a partnership that includes CMU, Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Known as Gigapan – short for Gigapixel Panoramas – the technology combines thousands of digital images to create a panoramic image in excess of one billion pixels. When combined with time-lapse, users can explore the space through time as well.

The Global Connections Project was also responsible for the National Geographic layer in Google Earth and some of the Katrina and Pakistan quake imaging. Here is their Gigapan page, which connects to a page about its commercial applications. (Pages are loading haphazardly at the moment, try refreshing or use these individual page caches, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Pennsylvania’s government isn’t the first to realize the appeal of Google Earth as a tool for rustling up tourists — until now, however, local towns, cities, or tourist boards have largely been content to donate imagery to Google, or to publish geospatial databases of points of interest as KML. Pennsylvania’s partnership takes this to the next level, apparently turning the Google Earth platform into an extremely high-resolution multimedia platform.

The press release doesn’t say, but I am guessing that the result of this grant, when complete, will just show up one day in an updated version of the Google Earth client, where we’ll have the ability to zoom much closer than currently, and use the time browser (or something like it) to navigate time-wise through base imagery. Here’s also hoping for authentic historic 3D buildings, and troop positions over the duration of the battles. Perhaps also by then we’ll have the ability to play 3D “presentations” in Google Earth, with voice overs and timed specific vantage points. But I’m just dreaming aloud.

[Update 21.01 UTC: Avi Avi Bar-Ze’ev has further interesting commentary on this news.]