My Google Map Blog

The biggest news for October was the release of Edition 2 of the Voyager layers. This included the introduction of a new layer called ‘Animal View’ and updates to the other layers. We colour coded the ‘Satellite imagery updates’ layer and talked about what the other layers show and how to access Edition 1.
 
 

Inspired by the new ‘Animal View’ layer we created a JavaScript tool to generate arcs between Placemarks or between points along a Polygon or Path.
 
 
 

There has been quite a lot of new imagery added to Google Earth during the month. Some of it can be found using Edition 2 of the Voyager layer, but there is a lot of imagery not included in that layer. We had a look at the Tianjin crater and a number of other locations that can be seen in the new imagery. More imagery has been released since then which we have not yet looked through.

Thank you to GEB reader Ali Shareef for letting us know in the comments that the crane that collapsed onto the Grand Mosque in Mecca killing 111 people and injuring 394 is visible in the imagery.

We had a look at Google Crisis Response and how to find your way around the different maps. Thank you to Christiaan Adams of Google Crisis Response for providing in the comments a link to satellite imagery relating to flooding in the Carolinas. Some of that imagery has since made it into Google Earth’s ‘historical imagery’.
 
 

Three new countries, Turkey, Ukraine and Macedonia got Street View.
 
 
 
 

Google continued releasing new 3D imagery throughout the month. A significant number of the additions were updates to areas that already had 3D imagery. Since Google does not show dates for 3D imagery nor provide an ‘historical imagery’ option, it can be difficult to identify these updates. We tend to know about them because they do usually show a colour change between the new and old imagery and the borders of the area covered may change. This month we showcased some 3D areas that are not primarily centres of population.

A big thank you to all the GEB readers that have been contributing to our 3D imagery KML file.

We had a look at how Google Earth calculates measurements and how the alignment of imagery may affect this. We also had a look at some locations using historical imagery animation to give you an idea of how far off imagery alignment can be and how it is affected by terrain.
 

We developed some JavaScript tools to aid us in maintaining our KML file of 3D areas. We shared a couple of these tools:

• A tool for merging Polygons or Paths
• A tool for numbering the points along a polygon and displaying the distances between points

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