Google Acquires ImageAmerica

Google has just announced on their Google Lat-Long blog that they have acquired ImageAmerica - a company that builds high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery. Google previously used imagery from ImageAmerica in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (Read more...)

Heat Map of KML and GeoRSS of the Earth

Barry Hunter has blogged about how he recently attended OpenStreetMap's first conference called "State of the Map". The interesting thing was a slide Barry saw that was presented by Ed Parsons (who was formerly with the UK's Ordinance Survey, and now works for Google). Ed presented a slide (click on the thumbnail above for a bigger picture) which shows a heat map of all the places found in KML and GeoRSS posts which have been indexed by Google's Geo Search engine. (Read more...)

European Campuses Want a 3D Contest Too

Jan-Philipp and five other students built models of their campus which they felt would have qualified for the contest Google recently ran to build 3D campuses. But, Google limited the contest to participants from the US and Canada. They wanted to share the model they built and suggest that maybe Google should do a European campus contest. (Read more...)

Singapore F1 Race Visualization in Google Earth

The folks at Earth@Sg have released an excellent Google Earth visualization of the setting of next year's Singapore Formula 1 (F1) car race. They have created some very nice 3D models of the downtown area, the grand stand, the race course, trees, and the Singapore Flyer ferris wheel. They also give you instructions for setting up your "Touring" options in Google Earth so you can pretend you are an F1 race car flying down the race course. (Read more...)

The Solar System in Google Earth

The 34 moon collection put out a couple days ago at the Barnabu blog has now been taken to the next natural evolution. James has changed the Earth into the Sun (by adding an image overlay) and then scaled the Moons down relative to the size of the Sun and added all the planets as 3D models as well. (Read more...)

New Layers Update - Earth at Night NASA Layer

Google has just pushed out a new layers update. The biggest new addition I've found is a new NASA layer under the "Featured Content" layer. One of the new features in the NASA layer is a "Earth at Night" image overlay for the entire Earth. It shows how much light various cities are putting out at night (or light pollution for those of us who like stargazing). Not only that, but the new layer is a regionated layer so when you zoom in closer it brings in more detail. (Read more...)

3D Campus Winners Now in 3D Buildings Layer

The seven winners of Google's 3D Campus contest are now viewable in the built-in 3D Buildings layer inside Google Earth. You could go look up each winning campus and find them, (Read more...)

Energy Production Information for Western US

Got an E-mail from Brian Timoney (as did Stefan at OgleEarth), of the Timoney Group, that they have just published a new web site focused on Energy Production information on the Rocky Mountains area of the Western US. They are taking full advantage of KML's ability to access remote servers to pull in more detail as you zoom in closer to an area of interest. This means you get access to a great deal of information without paying a performance penalty in GE. (Read more...)

TakItWithMe - Handy GPS Tool

Virgil of EarthNC.com has produced a very handy tool called TakItWithMe (in beta) which allows you to take placemarks, lines/paths, etc. from Google MyMaps or from Google Earth (or KML content from wherever) and download it straight to most Garmin GPSes - or port it to many other GPSes using the standard GPX file format. (Read more...)

Solar Eclipses in Google Earth

If you want to know about upcoming solar eclipses, there is an excellent web site by Xavier M. Jubier. Not only that, but he supports showing the paths showing where the eclipses are visible from (as well as historical eclipses back to 1961) in Google Earth. Here is an example of the next total solar eclipse (Read more...)

Encompassing the Globe

The Smithsonian Institute has a special exhibition through September 16th at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery which is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is called "Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries". (Read more...)

Solar System Moons in Google Earth

This is interesting: a size comparison of every moon (natural satellite of a planet) in the solar system larger in diameter than 100 km - all 34 of them - viewable in Google Earth. Download the 34 moons KML file here (4.5 Mbytes). James Stafford released the collection at his Barnabu blog today. The moons are actually fully texture-mapped 3D models placed in a single orbit around the Earth. (Read more...)

News Roundup: GE Design, Live Tour de France, PhotoSketch, Iran Nuclear Project

GE Design - Richard developed some excellent tutorials over a year ago which helped people better understand how to use GE and how to develop basic KML files. He has now started a blog called (Read more...)

Live Tour de France - As with the past two years you can see the route for Le Tour de France in Google Earth. Last year someone enabled live tracking of the race progress in GE, but this year  (Read more...)

PhotoSketch - Found a video of a very interesting Google Tech Talk given by George Wolberg. The talk describes technology he has been developing designed to take casual photographs and convert them quickly into texture-mapped 3D buildings. The technology is intended to automate as much of the process as possible, but still requires some human input. The key is that the methods  (Read more...)

Iran Nuclear Project - Stefan Geens of OgleEarth noticed some new published analysis which showed new tunneling activity near the Natanz nuclear complex in Iran. The analysis results released recent Digital Globe photography. Stefan points out you can overlay the imagery and make comparisons using the transparency (Read more...)

Bienvenidos!

Google Earth Blog (GEB) has many readers from different parts of the world. And now you can read this blog not only in English, but also en Español! The Spanish version can be found at es.gearthblog.com. (Read more...)

Largest Coca Cola Logo - Made from Bottles

According to a post at the Google Earth Community (GEC) by 'hugolvagancia', the world's largest Coca Cola logo is on a mountainside in Chile. The logo was made in honor of the 100th anniversary of coke (1986) and was made from 70,000 bottles of Coca Cola. The logo appears to be about 100 feet tall, and 400 feet wide (30 by 120 meters). (Read more...)

Pool Guy Taps Google Earth

A few days ago, KUTV of Salt Lake City reported on an interesting business model developed by Chris McCall of Provo, Utah. Chris is a young entrepreneur who has started a pool service and cleaning business and thanks to Google Earth, his business is doing very well. Rather than just sending a mailer to every house in a neighborhood, Chris got onto Google Earth and found the neighborhoods with the most pools. Then he drove out and wrote down (Read more...)

3D Dresden in Google Earth

The City of Dresden, Germany published today a huge collection of 3D building models of their city for viewing in Google Earth (also, see German version of the web announcement). Over 150,000 buildings are reported (German article) to be in the collection. That would make Dresden the city with the most number of 3D buildings available for Google Earth to date. (Read more...)

News Roundup - New GeoSearch, GeoWeb 2007, Traffic Gadget, Earthplot, Environmental Data

• New GeoSearch - In Google's latest Sightseer newsletter, Google describes new features to their KML search - which they are calling Geo search. When you are searching for something other than just a place - say: The Geo searching now supports both KML and GeoRSS. (Read more...)
  

• GeoWeb 2007 - The conference - July 23-27 - now has a new blog. (Read more...)
  

• Traffic Gadget - Google has announced a new gadget for your iGoogle page which lets you use Google Maps Traffic (Read more...)
  

• Earthplot - FreeGeographyTools blog posts about the Earthplot tools which were released in the early days of Google Earth. These tools enabled features which at the time were not in the free version of Google Earth (such as line and polygon drawing). But, the tools are now at version 1.3, are free, (Read more...)
  

• Environmental Data - OgleEarth discovers a huge collection of Google Earth KML environmental content from King's College of London. These are complex KML files with tons of interesting data buried within them. (Read more...)

New Seven Wonders of the World in Google Earth

Of the original seven wonders of the ancient world (man-made) only the pyramids of Giza are still standing. A web site called New Seven Wonders held a vote during the last several months in which many millions of people voted out of 21 different sites to select the next seven wonders. The winners were announced, appropriately enough, on 7/7/7 - yesterday. Here is a Google Earth file which shows the new seven wonders of the world . This file was posted at the Google Earth Community by someone called (Read more...)

Chinese Nuclear Sub in Google Earth

Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists has blogged he believes a sub found in satellite photos of Google Earth near Xiaopingdao Submarine Base south of Dalian is one of the new "JIN-class" nuclear submarines. (Read more...)

Live Earth Concerts in Google Earth

There is a lot of buzz in the news about the Live Earth concerts which are a series of concerts being held in 7 countries, and one special concert in Antarctica, this Saturday for 24 hours with the goal of raising awareness on the issues of global warming. Note the date is 7-7-07. Not surprisingly, Al Gore is one of the people behind it. (Read more...)

Philosophy Behind Google Earth and Maps

This week seems to be a good week to learn more about the technology and approaches behind the Google Earth/Maps applications. First we had one of the founders, Avi Bar-Ze'ev, of Keyhole publish an article on how Google Earth works and how it gets such smooth visualizations. It turns out, that Michael Jones - another founder of Keyhole, and now the Chief Technologist of Google Earth - has published an interesting article in the IEEE "Computer Graphics and Applications" magazine. (Read more...)

How Google Earth Really Works

One of the co-founders of Keyhole who helped build the virtual globe which later became Google Earth is Avi Bar-Ze'ev. Avi has worked on many interesting graphics projects in his career in addition to Keyhole, he worked on Second Life, and he worked on one of Disney Imagineering's virtual reality rides (Alladin's Magic Carpet). He has some unique understandings of the technical inner-workings of these popular applications. Although he doesn't work at Google, he sometimes comments on technical mis-interpretations that are being discussed about Google Earth and Second Life in the blogosphere. He recently moved his technical writings from his personal blog over to a new blog called RealityPrime. Yesterday, Avi had just published a very interesting technical description called "How Google Earth [Really] Works". (Read more...)

July 4th, Map within a Map, and Google Earth Moderator Meeting

Google invited a few dedicated volunteers here for a few days to see the sights while meeting to discuss some work for Google Earth. The moderators of the Google Earth Community (GEC) volunteer their time to help manage the huge population (850,000 registered members and millions of readers) of forum participants who post things they find interesting in Google Earth or discuss what has been found or shown. The moderators are a very interesting group of individuals (Read more...)

Quasi-global Near real-time Rainfall in Google Earth

Valery Hronusov, who is often innovating ways to get data into Google Earth, has developed a Google Earth visualization from data at a NASA research web site to produce this near global near real-time rainfall time animation. That's right, you can watch where rain has been falling over about a 12 hour time period. You simply load the rainfall network link (Read more...)

Visualizing LIDAR with Google Earth

A couple of researchers at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill shared some visualizations they have developed for Google Earth using LIDAR data (a kind of optical radar system that allows you to collect 3D information in digital form of outdoor scenery). Martin Isenburg and Jonathan Shewchuk have published some of their results at this web page. They are using view-based network links to let you view image overlays of LIDAR data, and they have developed tool so they can generate isocontours from the LIDAR and generate contour tiles viewable in Google Earth as well. (Read more...)

Google Maps New Additions for India and UAE

According to Mike Pegg's Google Maps Mania, Google has made some significant updates to Google Maps. This is on top of the really cool new addition to Google Maps two days ago which lets you do draggable driving directions. Here are the two main additions:

• Expanded Coverage for India
• United Arab Emirates (UAE) Added to Google Maps

(Read more...)