My Google Map Blog

Google has pushed out some significant updates to their Street View imagery today, launching in Hungary and Lesotho and greatly expanding their imagery in Poland and Romania (along with other parts of the world, including France, Italy, Russia, Singapore and Thailand).  Thanks to GEB reader ‘Munden’ for being the first to let us know about this update.

Not only have they added all of this imagery, but they’ve added quite a few new places using their trike system, such as Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong.

As always, remember that this imagery can be viewed in Google Maps but can also be viewed directly in Google Earth.  Here’s how that works:

You can read more about this update in this post on the Google Lat Long Blog.

The post Google launches Street View in Hungary and Lesotho; expands in Poland and Romania appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

In the wake of the tragic bombing and heroic capture of the suspects in Boston last week, a variety of tools have popped up to show where all of the events took place.

Google Maps Mania is a great place to start for resources like this, as they have a nice post that highlights some of the better maps that have been used over the past week.

Another good resource is this post on MyReadingMapped, which includes a very comprehensive map of all of the events.  You can view their entire list of locations on Google Maps, or download this KML file to see them all in Google Earth, as shown below.

The pursuit ended in the quiet city of Watertown, where the suspect was found hiding in a boat.  This simple file on Google Earth Hacks will take you directly to location of the boat.  As a nice touch, it also automatically adjusts your historical imagery slider to a time when the boat was more clearly visible.

If you have found any other great maps related to the events in Boston last week, please leave a comment and share them with us.

The post The Boston Marathon Manhunt in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth 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.