Google has posted the list detailing the imagery and terrain update from December 16. The list is reproduced below the fold for archival purposes.
Several of these updates provide some great new context to existing stories. For example:
Egypt: A big chunk of Egypt gets 2.5m resolution imagery, so this is a great time to once again check the KML file of my field trip to Wadi el Hitan, Whale Valley, from May 2007. The remote shallow valley, which contains fossiled 40-million year whales, was previously in 15-meter resolution, and the imagery did not include the new road. Here is the before and after imagery:
Harare: The wholesale depopulation of a neighborhood of Harare was documented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 2006. Google’s base imagery is now in high resolution, proving a third data-point for the KML layer.
Google Earth and mainstream consciousness I:Ubikcan flags a recent Doonesbury cartoon by Gary Trudeau highlighting the use of Google Earth to track human rights violations.
Ubikcan highlights to another one from the New Yorker a few months ago that I had not previously noticed. And while we’re on the topic, let’s not forget one of my all-time favorites, the Ogle Earth cartoon in the New Yorker from 2006?:-)
Google Earth and mainstream consciousness II: Sydney art collective The Glue Society produced a work that consists of retouched satellite imagery to depict biblical mythology. Says Glue Society’s James Dive: “We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real. As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.” Click here to see their work as depicted on Creative Review’s blog.
Mapping in the dark: What about using maps in the dark, for example when driving? IDVUX blog discovers a genial solution — run a color-inverting filter on the client side:
KMLer update: The latest version of Valery Hronusov’s KMLer 2.0 ArcGIS extension for Windows supports extended data fields. ($20-$50)
Mac geocoding I: Mac photogeoreferencing tool HoudahGeo is up to version 1.3. ($25)
Mac geocoding II:SnapMap is an upcoming application for representing your photos in 3D and across a timeline. There’s a video demo, and they’re looking for beta testers.
[Update 2:40 UTC: The possibilities are only just now beginning to percolate through: In a few months, when the iPhone SDK comes out, why not view astroreferenced news on your iPhone with Google Sky, and then (here is the cool bit) control your telescope with the iPhone to get it to view the location in question automatically!]
The most recent imagery update for Google Earth now includes the recently released 15-meter resolution LIMA imagery for much of Antarctica. Antarctica is looking pretty empty right now when it comes to default layers, but if you download the International Polar Year website’s KML layer, you can get daily updated georeferenced posts from scientific expeditions on Antarctica, including from the Norway-US Antarctic Traverse, which is currently on its way to the South Pole. Soon the layer will also include georeferenced posts by the research ship Polarstern, so keep that layer handy!
Back in June I had a chance to play with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer, and used the opportunity to check out which mapping sites worked on its browser. (Google Maps and Yahoo Maps Classic worked, Microsoft Virtual Earth did not.)
In the past few months, Intel and Microsoft have been touting a competitor, the Classmate, which runs Windows XP. Intel and Microsoft, both big sponsors of Global Knowledge 3 here in Kuala Lumpur, were showing off Classmates. I got to play with one. I’m sure you’re dying to know — does it run Google Earth? Virtual Earth in 3D?
I like the look of the Classmate. It is small and feels rugged. Spec-wise, Classmate and OLPC are similar in terms of RAM and NAND flash storage, but the Classmate suffers from a really small screen — 800×480 pixels (color). OLPC gets 1200×900 pixels (color).
Because the Classmate runs Internet Explorer on Windows XP, all the mapping sites loaded, though in all cases, the small screen meant that the actual map area of the web page was miniscule.
I installed Google Earth — the process went without a hitch. How does it run? As expected, because classmate has no graphics card, frame rates were very low:
As for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D, i never got the installation process to finish. Of course, it was very unfair of me to try this on a sub-$300 computer, but one can live in hope:-)
Which laptop will be more successful? I suspect that the developing world’s government education agencies will likely go for the Classmate because of the familiar Windows on it. Children, on the other hand, will care more about the cool screen. One BBC reporter who has been skeptical of the OLPC found that his kid loves the OLPC. Also, at half the price, you get more OLPCs than Classmates for your money, though you could also just wait 18 months for Moore’s Law to do its thing. In the end, it’s the OLPC that wins my heart, as it is such a radical departure from traditional laptops.
Google Earth patent: ZDNet’s Russell Shaw unearths (ha) a recently published patent application by Google that details how Google Earth does what it does, particularly over on the server side. The application was filed April 25, 2006, and published Dec 6, 2007. I eagerly await Avi Bar-Zeev’s exposition of What It All Means.
Daily geospace data as KML: Kyoto University’s Dagik. Wow. Quite a resource.
GIS for development: Over at Global Knowledge 3 I ran into the Canadian developers of the ICT4D Atlas, an open-source map-and-database tool that lets you add georeferenced information (at the country and city level) and then perform basic analysis on it. The idea is to develop this into a fully fledged tool to help development projects. It’s a work in progress, but worth mentioning here in case others in this space might want to collaborate. (The developers are active on PPGIS.net, a mailing list for participatory GIS technologies that I was not previously aware of.)
Earthmine is a competitor to Google Street View that was last blogged here in October. At the time, we noted that Earthmine turning automated city panoramas into an annotatable background canvas really is the state of the art. We even dared hope for some kind of vague far-off future where it is possible to “paint panoramas onto a very accurate 3D rendering of the world, so that every spot in the panorama and its corresponding coordinate on Earth become one.”
The best part: They’ve licensed the technology behind software used by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Rover team which turns a series of stereo imagery into 3D terrain that mission control can then use to steer the rovers.
(Plenty of 3D Mars data sets made with this software were released to the public together with a viewer back in 2004, and it was easily the coolest thing my Mac did that year. That viewer, Maestro, and the datasets, are still available for download today. A must if you haven’t already. Earthmine, now that you have the technology, is it too much to wish for Marsmine? Just the bits where the rovers have been will do…:-)
Only bummer: Earthmine is Flash based, and Apple isn’t doing Flash on the iPhone.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
