My Google Map Blog

3D Imagery
A large batch of 3D imagery was added to Google Earth around March 21st. We had a look at a 3D image of Trumps aircraft spotted in Florida.

Street View
Street View was added to Tunisia and a Vunuatuan Volcano.

Imagery Updates
We had a look at a number of events captured in Google Earth imagery, including:
* A tailings dam collapse in China
* The Gatlinburg, Tennessee Wildfire
* A collaped bridge in India
* Landslides in Kyrgyzstan
* The Australian Open and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
* A plane crash, a derailed train and a fireworks explosion

We had a look at the enormous volume (petabytes) of imagery being produced by the various imagery providers. Adding to the growth of the imagery, ESA’s Sentinel-2B satellite was successfully launched on March 7th. To help make sense of it all, satellite imaging company Planet released a new version of their Explorer tool, which now includes an ‘historical imagery’ feature. Also, Decartes Labs released an imagery search engine capable of finding imagery using pattern matching.

Google Earth Tour Builder
We have started a series developing a Tour Builder for Google Earth:
Part 1: Circling
Part 2: Arcs
Part 3: Labelling

Canals
We had a look at a number of different canal systems:
A water transfer canal project in Brazil
The Suez Canal expansion project
The Panama Canal expansion project

The post The best of Google Earth for March 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

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Google has recently released a new batch of 3D imagery. The last major release was in early February. Thank you to all the GEB readers that contribute by finding new areas and drawing outlines. Below is a chart showing the areas in square kilometres released over time. It does not include all of the recent March batch as only some of the outlines have been drawn so far.

To see the area covered by 3D in Google Earth download our KML map.

Keep in mind that the above areas do not include updated regions. These can be difficult to identify so we do not track them. The general trend is a decline in new area covered. We believe that this is partly a reflection of the fact that most of the large population centres in countries where Google is releasing 3D imagery have already been covered. It is likely that Google still releases approximately the same area of 3D imagery each month, but much of it is now updates, not new areas.

The largest single area at 19,500 square kilometres is now the New York City region. It includes parts of five different states and is more than double the area of the second largest region (San Francisco at 7,800 sq km).

Thank you to GEB reader Ryan for pointing us to Trump’s aircraft captured in 3D in one of the latest 3D releases in Florida:

It is parked not far from Mar-a-Largo, owned by Trump and which he now refers to as his Southern White House. We were unable to date the 3D imagery as there is not much aerial imagery in that location to compare it with. Trump now uses Airforce One, which we have also looked at in 3D. Find it in Google Earth with this KML file.

The post Google Earth 3D imagery progress appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Larger (thanks Matthew)

Larger (thanks Bill)

This is part 3 of our Tour Builder series where we try to develop tools to make creating Google Earth Tours easier.

When you create a tour that visits a list of locations, one thing you want to do is display the name of the location to the user. There are a number of possible ways to do this:

Basic Placemarks.
Probably the easiest method is to simply create a placemark with the appropriate name and an icon of your choice, or remove the icon altogether. You can adjust the font size and colour in the placemarks style settings, but it is has limited flexibility. In addition, if you are distributing your Google Earth Tour, labels can be affected by the settings in the user’s copy of Google Earth as well as screen shape and size.

A simple customised placemark label.

Placemark balloons.
Placemark balloons can contain HTML including css and JavaScript, which makes them very flexible. With JavaScript you can even animate the contents of the balloon. However, there are still significant limitations. Although you can get rid of the ‘directions’ row in the balloon, the border and close button cannot be customised or removed nor can the balloon be made transparent. You can position the balloon in the corner of the screen by putting the placemark off the edge of the screen, but as shown below, the balloon always leaves a margin between it and the edge of the screen.

Post-production.
If you are making your tour into a video, then the best option is probably to add most of your text using video editing tools.

Screen Overlays.
A Screen Overlay is a KML feature that allows you to place an image on screen at the location of your choosing. This is what is typically used for map keys or logos in KML files. PNG files with transparency are allowed, which is a significant advantage over placemark balloons. The main disadvantage of this technique is that it only allows images and not text or HTML so you must put your text into an image prior to creating the KML file.
It is also possible to use Google Earth Tour features to animate the image, sliding it onto the screen at the appropriate point in the Tour. You can try this tour to see it in action.

The post Google Earth Tour builder: Part 3 – Labelling appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

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This week we take a look at some of the funniest signs found on Google Maps Street View. Be sure to check out Part 1. And don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE!