My Google Map Blog

Google has been rolling out 3D imagery for over three years. The focus has been almost entirely on centres of population. However, there are a few places where Google has mapped interesting geographical features rather than centres of population. Today we are featuring the main ones we are aware of.

Hoover Dam, Colorado River, Arizona/Nevada. We featured this when looking at Google Earth Pro’s Movie Maker feature

Sassolungo Mountain Group, Italy

Arches National Park, Utah (screenshot is not actually in the park but within the same 3D area)

A section of The Grand Canyon has 3D imagery. The rest of the Grand Canyon already has fairly high resolution terrain that is not part of the 3D imagery.

The Grand Canyon Skywalk

Zion National Park, Utah

El Capitan, Yosemite National Park and surrounding area. El Capitan also has vertical Street View.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Crater Lake, Oregon

For the locations featured in this post, download this KML file. For a complete map of all areas covered with 3D download this KML file.

The post Google’s 3D is not just for cities appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

A couple of weeks ago Google updated the Voyager layer, adding a new sub-layer called ‘Animal View’. The layer includes some nice arcs between placemarks. However, there is no automatic way to create these arcs with Google Earth or in KML. We do not know how Google created them, but when we have seen it done in the past (such as in this KML) it was done programmatically.

We thought a utility to create these arcs might be useful.

In order to draw an arc we first needed to work out the location of points along a great circle between two points. We did this with assistance from this website. We have used a simple sine wave and by default make the maximum altitude of the centre of the arc one fourth of the distance between the two points. There is also the option to set the maximum altitude of the arc. We have used altitudes relative to the ground, which has the advantage of making sure the end points start from the ground, but as can be seen in the screen shot above, if there is a significant dip in the ground altitude it is mirrored in the arc as well (notice dips where the arc crosses the river). This effect is not noticeable for larger arcs.

You can include multiple features, such as Placemarks, Polygons or Paths. All Placemarks will be put together and arcs drawn between pairs of consecutive points. Polygons and Paths will have an arc between each consecutive point.

If you don’t like the styling, you can adjust that later in Google Earth or in the KML.

No of segments to divide into:

Altitude method: AutomaticFixed

Maximum altitude: (metres relative to ground)

Extrude:YesNo (shades the area below the arc)

Create Arcs

The post Drawing arcs with JavaScript appeared first on Google Earth Blog.