Google has brought out a handful of new 3D cities in the past few days. Today saw the release of Seattle and Pittsburgh, both of which now have hundreds of full-color buildings and look excellent. Here is a shot from Pittsburgh.
A few days ago, Google unveiled a new layer for Google Earth that has over 5700 hundred buildings from ancient Rome rebuilt in 3D. It’s a slow-loading collection, but it is amazing. Here is a short video introducing the new layer:
A couple of cool new things today:
Google Earth is now available as a free app for the iPhone. Not only is it free, but it’s good! It looks very similar to the normal Google Earth program, includes 3D terrain, Wikipedia/Panoramio icons and a few other goodies. No 3D buildings, but that’s not a problem for now. The interface is phenomenal, with superb gesture controls and even a bit of accelerometer support. My wish for version 2 is that they offer some kind of KML support so we can push our own files out to it.
Google Maps StreetView is now in Spain. They’ve added StreetView to four Spanish cities – Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia and Barcelona. As you find cool sights in those areas, be sure to post them to our StreetView section, which now has nearly 2500 locations in it!
Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware should be out in a few weeks and promises to have StreetView support, so that will be kind of a mesh of these two items. Hopefully the interface on that is as good as it is in the new Google Earth application.
As reported by Google Maps Mania and the Digital Earth Blog, Google Maps StreetView has just gotten a lot more imagery in France. In particular, they now have:
If you find any cool stuff out there, be sure to submit it to our StreetView database.
My wife and I have been big fans of The Amazing Race for a few years now, so I thought it’d be fun to track their route throughout the season. Below is their map after the first leg, from Los Angeles, CA to Salvador, Brazil. I’ll be updating the map each week with more information, photos, etc, so check back each week to see the latest updates.
The red lines/icons are areas that have already been completed (as shown on TV), the green pushpin is their current location, and the yellow lines are the future destinations for the contestants.
Be sure to zoom in on each area of the map for more details and information.
If you’re away from home and looking for something to kill some time, we’ve got your answer — GEH: Mobile. It’s thousands of files from our database in the palm of your hand, in the format of a simple mobile website. It’s designed with the iPhone in mind, but should work well with any recent smartphone. Having only been able to test on an iPhone, I’d love to get some feedback from other smartphone users (N95, etc).
The mobile site gives you quick access to about 80% of our file library (no 3D models or image overlays). You can view the newest files, most popular file, or view them by category. Every file has a thumbnail, and will link you to the real location on Google Maps — on the iPhone it will launch the “Maps” application and take you there. In addition, you can sort items by date/popularity, read full descriptions and view comments made by other users.
Visit the site on your phone by going to m.gearthhacks.com. If you save a bookmark to your home screen on your iPhone, you’ll get a custom GEH icon as shown above. Below are a few screenshots.
Have fun!
Exactly five months after it first launched, our StreetView section received its 2000th file — not bad!
File # 2000 was a good find — a clear shot of the streetview car in a mirror on the side of the road.
Of the 2000 files, the most popular (by votes) is the “burning car“, which is pretty self-explanatory. The most-viewed file is “girl changing clothes at car“, with over 24,000 views.
We’ve got some big plans to improve our StreetView section even further, so keep sending us your great finds!
Mickey
It appears there are some major imagery updates that have just been released for Google Earth. Google Earth Blog has a growing list, which includes locations from all over the world (US, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy, etc).
It seems to be quite a huge update! Keep your eyes on Google Earth Blog or Digital Earth Blog as more locations are found.
Tropical Atlantic has built some useful tools for Google Earth, showing a variety of possible storm tracks for all of the major storms. Being able to side a wide variety of computer models in Google Earth gives you a great way to see where the storms might land. Check it out!
As I revealed on the Digital Earth Blog last night, EarthSwoop has launched. What is it? EarthSwoop is a tool you can use to easily create collections of locations around the globe. Some examples:
It’s very easy to create a collection, and the result is a nice interface with lots of tools to enhance your data. Here is a short video that shows you how to create a collection, or you can get a little more info over on the Digital Earth Blog.
Here is an example of an embedded collection, the 30 Major League Baseball stadiums:
Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection
As reported by the Digital Earth Blog and Google Earth Blog, the Google Earth plug-in now works in Firefox 3! This was a silent update, as you don’t even need to update your plug-in — it simply works. Presumably some code on the backend has been updated.
Updating browser plug-ins can be a pain, and I was worried that we’d be seeing a lot of them from Google as they get the plug-in fixed up. However, this will be quite nice if they can do most of the updating remotely and not require users to update the plugin themselves.
It’s still a Windows-only program, but they’re making progress. Now you Firefox 3 users can play with ShareIt, or embed our other files, or play games such as Monster Milktruck.
