Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. I used to try new versions of the Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization tool to see if they had added support for VE3D, but all I got for my efforts were very hard crashes, not just of Windows but of the entire machine.

Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D. Here’s a screenshot from this morning when giving it another go:

it only works when Windows applications are grouped together in one window, but it does work, and this makes it less of a hassle for Mac users like me to check up on this virtual globe’s progress. (Make sure to turn on the “Accelerate 3D graphics” option in the settings.)

• ArcGIS Explorer API: ESRI is about to announce an API for ArcGIS Explorer, reports All Points Blog, and adds, “A few additional products in the ArcGIS Explorer family will be announced as well.” Yes! The Mac and Linux versions! Just kidding. Meanwhile, the official ArcGIS Explorer blog showcases an example of ArcGIS Explorer being put to use at the municipal level.
• Wavelength slider: Microsoft’s upcoming WorldWide Telescope will support easy switching between different wavelength views of the sky. Robert Simpson at Orbiting Frog couldn’t wait that long so he has cobbled together a time-line based dynamic overlay for Google Sky: Each month in the timeline shows an overlay for a different wavelength range. Move the time slider to switch between overlays. It’s a hack, but in the best sense of the word.
• Spreadsheet Mapper how-to: Eric Pimpler at Geochalkboard is embarking on a series of posts “on some of the lesser know tools provided by Google for creating data layers in Google Earth and Google Maps.” First up: Using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 with Google Earth & Google Maps
• Google Earth video tutorials: Richard Treves at Google Earth design blog has posted a series of new video tutorials on using Google Earth tools. The twist: you navigate to them using Google Earth.
• Megatsunami chevrons, anyone? Help paleomagneticist and science blogger Chris Rowan find more candidate megatsunami chevrons.
• Nanaimo: Time magazine has an article about how the Canadian town Nanaimo has been georeferencing a chunk of its public services and published them as KML with the help of Google. Slashdot picks up the article, and Google Earth blog provides context.
• Size matters: Whose mosque is the biggest? One way to find out is to take snapshots in Google Earth from the same height and with the height mesh turned off, and then compare them.
• LOLmaps: Ethan Zuckerman has a fantastic blog post on digital activism that follows up on his talk at Etech, “The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism”. The gist: When activists start using a new digital communications tool, that is a sure sign the tool is ready for mainstream use. Zuckerman mentions plenty of examples that involve neogeography.

The Jerusalem Post‘s David Shamah opinionates about the Google Earth Community layer in Google Earth and on whether Google is responsible for the accuracy of its content in the context of the recent news that the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam is attempting to take Google to court for slander.

The first half of the article is incomprehensible to me (what do “false flags” have to do with anything?) but the second half provides a good retort as to why Thameen Darby’s layer may not be so reliable. Still, Shamah gets it wrong when he concludes:

Of course, the Google people will say that anyone who wishes to catalog the Israeli side of the story is welcome to. But if Google wants its tools to become the vehicles that supply us with the information we need, it has a responsibility – because of its respectability – to ensure that the balance is there, and not leave it up to “volunteers.”

Actually, Yes, do leave it up to the volunteers. There is a precedent for it — it is called Wikipedia. Shamah knows about Wikipedia — he uses it repeatedly in his article to reference his argument.

• Geolinguistics: Wow. The Rossetta Project is “a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.” Now they’ve put their content into KML: Check out some wonderful KML mapping of endangered languages in Africa and the Americas, and of language use in US urban centers, but I was blown away by these two layers: Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s georeferenced sound recordings of disappearing languages in Oceania, Asia and the Americas, and the historical archive of John Peabody Harrington, with recordings of Native American tribes in the first half of the last century. (The latter two are Flash-based, so they’re Windows-only at the moment.) (Via TipLine)
• Iditarod 2008: Live GPS positions of the dogsleds in this year’s Iditarod as a KML network link, augmented by stats and weather data. Lovely layer.
• Free distribution of your 3D city data! Google’s new Cities in 3D program basically offers to bankroll the distribution of municipalities’ 3D data to citizens all over the world, in effect crowdsourcing public planning while boosting tourism and economic development.

  Everybody is thrilled, unless, of course, you happen to be the UK Ordnance Survey, in which case you continue to think it is reasonable to be paid for London’s 3D data by the transaction when these transactions run into the millions.

• What’s in a name: This week we learned that most mainstream media still don’t know the difference between Google Maps, Street View and Google Earth. Associated Press probably started the “Google Earth banned” meme, but sites like Drudge picked it up and ran with it uncritically. I’m surprised as anyone that an army base gave permission to have a Google car drive around taking panoramic snapshots — it is not exactly accessible to the public and militaries are not models of transparency. So: Kudos to the transparency-loving officer who gave the original permission to Google, but I’d argue that reversing that “mistake” is not what I’d call a ban — something else most of the media got wrong.
• What’s in a name II: Google Maps mashups make it into New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition. In keeping with the theme, there’s an online exhibition where you can view them. Unfortunately, MoMA’s curators don’t know the difference between Google Maps and Google Earth either, and call them “Google Earth mashups”… Isn’t that like confusing Matisse’s still lifes with his collages? (Via Renalid)

If you’ve got a digital camera, chances are you organize your photos with Picasa or iPhoto. If you’re a dedicated amateur photographer, you’re likely using Aperture for Mac or Adobe Bridge. But if you’re a newspaper or magazine photo editor, and you count your photos in the hundreds of thousands spanning up to a decade, you’re more than likely to have them stuffed on countless DVDs and external hard drives.

For the latter situation, there has long been CDFinder for Mac, a cataloguing tool for all sorts of files on removable media (and hard drives) that allows for far more specific searching than Apple’s own Finder/Spotlight or Microsoft Windows, with the added benefit that the media/drives don’t need to be connected to the computer to search them.

So what happens when the developer, Germany’s Norbert Doerner, gets bitten by the geotagging bug? Why, he turns CDFinder into a geosearch marvel.

Best to show you by example. Below I have a catalog of some photos of mine that contain EXIF coordinate metadata. These photos don’t necessarily have to be on a mounted drive at the moment. The first thing you can do is view their location on a map, with a whole range of options available to you:

And if you read the manual, you find that you can create your own menu options here to include whatever mapping solution you fancy, as the coordinates are available as variables that you can insert into any URL string and add to the list.

That’s much more versatile than the one link to Google Maps provided by the Preview application in Mac OS X 10.5. But the next trick is more impressive: You can do a proximity search on your photos. Just right click on one and head for the Find menu item:

Next, you get asked for the radius of the circle within which you want to find photos…

And up pops a list, with previews, of photos meeting that criteria. That’s got to be a fantastic feature for regional papers reporting on a story and looking for photos of a specific spot in their archives (assuming they’ve been geotagged).

Do try this out yourself — there is a free trial (license is $39). One caveat: You need to turn on this photo geosavviness in the preferences, under Cataloging > Read Media-info, to use these search options.

You just know this stuff is eventually going to make it into operating systems by default, it’s just that it will take ages. Here’s hoping that this kind of smart geosavvy search gets extended to photos in my Aperture library, or that Aperture gets plugins to do this. And here’s me hoping that photo browsing tools soon let me roam a mapped view of my photos, or accept a bounding box on a map as a search query, right from my desktop.

Er, actually, that day may come sooner rather than later. As I wrote this post, The Map Room linked to a recent post on High Earth Orbit where Andrew Turner shows off GeoSpotlight, a Mac application he whipped up that lets you search for images via their EXIF coordinate metadata (which Spotlight indexes as of OS X version 10.5) using a bounding box, and showing a selected image on a Map. It’s great to see GUIs being developed that bring this raw capability of OS X 10.5 to us non-command line people:

More information trickles out about Jonathan Fay’s and Curtis Wong’s upcoming Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. First, a blog post by CNET’s Ina Fried puts a name to the new projection system (“Toast”) and dispels any hope there might be a Mac version down the line:

I wondered why Fay was less than enthusiastic about prospects for a native Mac version. He said the type of programming needed to make the software a reality can be done vastly faster using Microsoft’s .Net and C# programming tools.

To make it truly cross-platform, he said, “I’d basically be looking at three to four years of development.” Plus, he quipped, “It doesn’t hurt if a few people buy Windows.”

Then, you can watch the now-infamous video where Robert Scoble gets a demo of the technology (Via Virtual Earth/Live Maps Blog). Although Scoble manages to ask the weirdest questions, the video still gives us end-bloggers much more to go on:-) So, here’s the good, the bad and the ugly:

Good: Sure enough, “Toast” renders the polar regions beautifully, and that’s a big advantage over Google Sky. Switching between imagery databases (for different wavelengths or telescopes) is near-instant. And Curtis Wong also shows off a gigapixel panorama of Yosemite National Park using the Toast engine. It looks like QuickTimeVR on steroids. Finally, the tour and voice-over recording feature looks wonderful — and imagine how you could use it on Earthly panoramas! For example, egyptologists could take a 360-degree panorama of a burial room covered in hieroglyphics and start narrating the texts as you pan across it… Or take a panorama of the interior of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and have an art historian start showing off its highlights…

Bad: Though not bad per sé, none of the previews to date show any hint that it will be possible for us end-users to add overlays and annotations to the sky canvas (rather than screen overlays, which the demo shows you can), and then share them via open formats like KML. There is something to be said for having Microsoft serve views for every wavelength and telescope instead of expecting third parties to build the overlays, but that first feature need not preclude the latter.

Ugly: Jonathan Fay’s answer above shows that WWT is first and foremost a technology showcase for .Net and C# rather than a universal sky browser. That makes a certain amount of sense if you ask how or whether Microsoft might want to monetize WWT: Google Sky rides on the back of a monetizable Google Earth; why should Microsoft spend $$$ on development and servers for WWT? Well, it is great advertising for the Microsoft brand and also good corporate citizenship, but WWT is likely to remain a cost center rather than a profit center for a while yet.

Some more notes: Neither Google Sky nor WWT are comparable taxonomically to Celestia. Celestia is a different beast, a 3D model of the universe that you can roam around in, much more like the industrial strength UniView shown off att ISDE5 in June 2007. Google Sky and WWT let you zoom in on a 360-degree panorama of the universe taken from just one perspective: Earth. It would certainly be nice to have a 360-degree panorama of the sky as a backdrop when roaming around the solar system, and to have Earth and Mars and the Moon rendered as accurate virtual globes inside this application, but until now neither Google nor Microsoft have betrayed any sign of building something like it. Quite possibly, that’s because there are few ads online for martian property at the moment:-)

Free-associating some more: WWT’s ability to control your own actual telescope so that it moves to the same spot that you’re seeing on the screen raises some interesting possibilities down the line. If you add a CCD to the end of the telescope (as some amateur astronomers do), then why not broadcast your sessions live to WWT via the web as coordinate-tagged video that people can find and subscribe to…. Or perhaps you’ll be able to save the logs of your observing sessions, and then marry them to the photos you took through your telescope, much as we now marry GPS tracks with the photos we take on trips to automatically georeference them…

Just a quickie…

• Google Earth Saves! WBOC, “Delmarva’s News Leader”, March 3: “GPS, Google Earth Used to Rescue Stranded Hunter“:
  

  Delaware fish and wildlife officials have rescued a hunter stranded on the marsh using his phone’s GPS signal and Google Earth.

  Clever hunter, phoning in his coordinates. No word on whether Google Earth saved any animals:-) (PS: Delmarva is in Maryland)

• Google Earth, er, saves? The Times of London, March 2: “Google Earth showed protesters way to conquer parliament“.
  

  Demonstrators revealed yesterday that they had used Google Earth to plot their protest on the roof of the Houses of Parliament last week against the expansion of Heathrow.

  Personally, I’d also have used Virtual Earth’s bird’s eye view for such an operation… In any case, they still needed the help of an insider to get their protest gear through the door.

• New geotag icon: Got geotagged photos (or blog posts or anything else for that matter) on your website? Point visitors in the right direction with a very cool (free) geotag icon that’s hoping to become a standard. (Via The Map Room)
• Photo revolutions: This is not strictly neogeo-related, but since interest in mapping tends to correlate with interest in photography… Over on CNet, Stephen Shankland has an interesting survey of what’s next in digital photography, from 3D to perspective shifting to focusing as a software option to panoramas. Everything except geotagging and geopositioning, actually.