My Google Map Blog

Google Earth 7.1 has just been released!  Among the many bug fixes and enhancements is native support for the Leap Motion controller, due out in the coming months.  We discussed it earlier this year as possibly an excellent controller for Google Earth, and their latest video has me even more excited — check it out!

As for other enhancements in Google Earth 7.1, they’re mostly found in the latest version of Google Earth Pro.  The two new capabilities over there include:

Map-Making: Create legends and scales and add titles to a map, directly from Google Earth Pro. You can also print your customized map or save it as an image. To conduct an environmental survey, for example, enhanced map-making tools let you highlight changes to land mass over time and document those changes directly in the map by adding a legend.

Viewshed: Identify and calculate viewpoints, measuring distances and visualizing potential views. For example, an architecture firm could use the viewshed tool to measure a view from a building or window without being physically on-site.

You can read about those enhancements on the Google Enterprise blog, or learn more about Google Earth 7.1 from this post on Google+.

To get a copy of Google Earth 7.1 for yourself, simply download it from their site.  Have fun!

After you have a chance to play with the new version, leave a comment and let us know what you think of it.

The post Google Earth 7.1 released; adds support for Leap Motion appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Today is Earth Day, a time to sit back and think about our wonderful planet, and some of us will be out picking up some trash, or just enjoying nature.

For those of you stuck inside due to weather, work, or other reasons – perhaps you might want to spend the day exploring our wonderful planet through the power of Google Earth. Here are a few links of stories from Google Earth Blog in the past year describing environmental related content available for viewing in Google Earth:

• Teaching about the ocean floor with Google Earth
• Researchers rediscover lost butterfly species with the help of Google Earth
• Watching our watersheds in Google Earth
• Street View goes underwater
• Saving elephants with Google Earth
• Beautiful images from Google Earth Outreach

For more, you can check out our posts from 2012, 2011, 2010 or 2009 and read stories that go back even further.

The post Explore Google Earth on Earth Day appeared first on Google Earth Blog.