My Google Map Blog

Google has just announced that they’ve purchased Skybox Imaging for $500 million, in an effort to help keep imagery updated more rapidly, improve global internet access, and assist in disaster relief.

Google’s press release on the acquisition was short and to the point:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has entered into an agreement to buy Skybox Imaging for $500 million in cash, subject to adjustments.

Skybox’s satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US.

You can also read more on the Skybox blog.

The post Google acquires Skybox Imaging for $500 million appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Here’s an interesting use of Google Earth, that could apply to virtually any business with a variety of locations. Nik Freeman wanted to find a way to display the density of Waffle House restaurant locations across the United States, so he put together a visual display of them. He had intended to simply use it as a way to play with 3D in Google Earth, but the big spike in Atlanta was interesting enough that he wanted to share the image.

Some of Nik’s notes on the “quads” that display the data:

• The quads are continuous across the entire USA. There are no gaps, so every Waffle House location falls within one quad.
• Quad boundaries are static. They will not have changed if I update the data.
• Quads are named for the area they cover, making it easy to discuss particular locations.
• At approximately 2392 square miles each, quads are a nice “bucket” size for tabulating this kind of location data meaningfully.

It’s a great way to show this kind of data. You can read more over on his “Maps by Nik blog“.

( via Huffington Post)

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I’ll be speaking today (with Ali Green, my partner at GreenMellen) at the monthly Georgia URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) meeting here in Atlanta at lunchtime today. We’ll be discussing how to use WordPress with GIS, which is a great topic since this blog (as well as Frank’s Tahina Expedition are powered by WordPress.

Slides from the presentation can be found on the GreenMellen blog.

Do you use WordPress? What kind of fun GIS plugins do you use?

The post Connecting WordPress with GIS appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

We’ve talked about Google’s Liquid Galaxy project a number of times over the years, starting back in 2009 and showing neat things such as Paul van Dinther’s excellent A-tour along the way.

The End Point Corporation has been doing some great things with Liquid Galaxy recently, so we’ve asked their Business Technology Analyst Bianca Rodrigues to fill us in on what they’ve been doing.  Her thoughts are below:

As readers here well know, the Google Earth platform provides an unparalleled exploration platform for our globe (and the Moon and Mars). At End Point, we are continuing to push this exploration platform further with the Liquid Galaxy: an interactive, panoramic system, which combines wrap-around screens and computers to create an immersive experience for the user controlled from a single SpaceNav controller, touchscreen, or Leap Motion

The Liquid Galaxy is an open source project founded by Google and further developed by End Point. It started out as a Google Earth viewer, but has evolved to become an ideal data visualization tool for operations, marketing, and research. It brings rich satellite imagery, oceanic data, and points of interest from all over the globe.

Liquid Galaxy for different industries
There are many applications, including real estate, GIS, events/hospitality, educational institutions and museums and aquariums.

With GIS, for example, End Point can take almost any data set that contains GIS coordinates and superimpose the data within Google Earth. The data visualizations—bar graphs, area heat maps, connecting lines—can then be navigated with a full spatial experience in a simulated 3D space.

Loading GIS data into Google Earth on the Liquid Galaxy as KML (one of Google Earth’s mark-up languages) helps users interact and visualize their data in a totally new way.

If you already have data in KML then it’s a no-brainer to use the Liquid Galaxy as a powerful tool to exhibit the data and to entrance audiences. If you don’t have your GIS data in KML format yet, End Point has a GIS-to-KML conversion service which can transform data to create an effective presentation in Google Earth.

This immersive multi-screen technology helps to promote a collaborative research environment. The Liquid Galaxy is perfect for an office operations center, data analysis center, civic planning, extractive industries, or equally great for an eye-catching corporate presentation at a trade show.

More Features: Interactive Spaces
Interactive Spaces is an Open Source project being developed at Google (originally in collaboration with The Rockwell Group’s Lab) for doing what it says: making physical spaces interactive. Interactive Spaces is a well-structured framework for connecting hardware peripherals (such as motion sensors, input devices, and monitor screens) with software applications (such as Google Earth, web browsers, and 3D games) to form a coherent interactive experience in a physical space.

With such a workable and robust platform available, Interactive Spaces is a natural fit for controlling the input and output events for the Liquid Galaxy. At its core the Liquid Galaxy is a multi-computer, multi-screen data interactivity platform, taking input from a touchscreen, 3D Space Navigator, or even a treadmill, and displaying different kinds of data on multiple screens: Google Earth, panoramic photos, panoramic videos, as well as non-panoramic imagery and data.

To date, End Point has been working in development and test mode on Interactive Spaces-powered Liquid Galaxies. In addition to the systems we have set up in our offices, we have set it up for testing at a couple of Google labs that have an interest in Interactive Spaces. The most visible change to the system is an overhaul of the touchscreen interface to blend the experience of Google Earth Locations and scenic Google Street View locations such as museum interiors and coral reefs.

The integration of Google Earth and Google Street View into a unified experience is one of the most exciting developments from adopting Interactive Spaces. The two applications fade into each other seamlessly, all orchestrated by an AngularJS webapp. Because every activity in the system communicates with the others, it was easy to have a map on the touchscreen follow the position of the Earth camera without the complexity of instructing different systems written in different languages to talk to each other.

Where we are taking it
We are embracing the possibilities of Interactive Spaces. As a scriptable event manager, with multiple input streams, programmable interactions, and married with the multi-screen-multi-device platform of the Liquid Galaxy, we’re excited about the new possibilities. We welcome input and conversations with other Open Source developers, shops, and end-client agencies to tax our brains on what we can make this great platform do. Got an idea? Ping End Point.

The post Expanding the capabilities of the Liquid Galaxy appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

We’ve seen a handful of “virtual” cities and countries over the years, such as Virtual Alabama and Virtual Kenya. The platforms give users access to a wide array of information about the area and can be quite useful.

Recently at an archaeological seminar held at the University of Bern, the Virtual Cilicia Project was launched to help gain insight into this historic area.

As with similar programs we’ve seen in the past, this gives great insight into the history and provides access to field research projects from the university.

To get started, simply download this KML file and open it in Google Earth. Use the various checkboxes on the left side of your screen to enable and disable various features as you browse around.

For more, check out the full post about the project here. Note that the page is in German, but your browser can likely translate it fairly well.

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We continue to receive many emails each week asking how to correct map errors in Google Earth (address in the wrong location, point of interest is missing, etc), so I thought it’d be worth revisiting that.

To start, you don’t actually fix the errors in Google Earth; you fix them in Google Maps, and those corrections are synced into Google Earth over the course of a few weeks.  The process has changed slightly in the new Google Maps, so here’s how it works.

To suggest a correction, click on the small question mark in the lower right corner of the screen inside of Google Maps and choose “Report a data problem”.

Next, click on the map to show Google the exact location with the problem.

After that, the window in the upper left corner of Google Maps will ask for details, based on the type of object you just clicked. For example, if you clicked on a road Google will ask you questions related to roads (“doesn’t exist”, “one-way/two-way is incorrect”, etc).  If you click on a business, it will ask you questions related to the business.

I’ve suggested quite a few edits to my local area, and all have been accepted into Google Earth/Maps and helped make my town more accurate. I’ve updated street names, new roads, closed restaurants, etc.  I’m a heavy user of the GPS navigation features on Google Maps for my Android phone, so having an accurate map is very important.

The “report a problem” feature is a great tool to help make Google products more accurate for everyone. To learn more about how this process works, you can visit this page in the Google Maps support system.

The post How to fix errors in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The New South Wales (Australia) Government has just released a new product they’re calling the NSW Globe which compiles a ton of information about the state into a single, powerful KML file. The goal of the site, according to NSW minister for finance and services Andrew Constance:

The tool allows users to find out more about their property or local area, and provides access to historical information including aerial photographs of Sydney from the 1940s, as well as flood maps from places like Bourke, Moree and Wagga

Inside the KML file you’ll find the following:

• Imagery (medium and high resolution aerial, satellite both government and private sourced)
• Additional imagery (1943 Sydney Historic, Emergency Services)
• Terrain data (25m DTMS, 5m DTMS, LiDAR and SRTM various locations)
• Places (e.g. population centre, suburb, other places)
• Boundaries (e.g. coastline, local government, localities, electoral state and federal)
• Roads (e.g. arterial road, minor road, other)
• Rail (e.g. railway line, railway station)
• Addresses (property and address)
• Land parcel (e.g. lot and deposited plan, property boundary, labels)

For example, here is a shot of Sydney using the 1943 imagery:

It’s quite an impressive product and it provides an amazing amount of information about New South Wales. Check it out for yourself at globe.six.nsw.gov.au.

(via TechWorld)

The post Exploring New South Wales, Australia in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The city of Charlottesville, Virginia has plans for a major redevelopment of 330 acres.  While the plans are still in progress, Brian Wheeler took advantages of Google Earth to add some great context to his recent story about the plans.  He simply took the proposed plans and created an image overlay of them in Google Earth, as seen here:

You can download a copy of his KMZ file here to see it for yourself.  As for his reasons why he chose to use Google Earth to help show the plans?

Whenever I see someone looking at the Strategic Investment Area map when it’s projected, they ask where exactly that is in Charlottesville. Google Earth to the rescue! Even works great on my tablet using the Google Earth app.

Be sure to check out his full article on the Charlottesville Tomorrow site to learn more.  Great work, Brian!

(via +Brian Wheeler)

The post Visualizing redevelopment using Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The Independent recently posted an article that explores the difficult yet essential job that TV show “location managers” have. Finding the perfect spot for a particular scene can be a major challenge.

The position requires many different tools, including Google Earth.  From the article:

Another useful tool of the trade is Google Earth, says Breaking Bad’s [Alex] Gianopoulos. “If I’m looking for swimming pools or parking-lots, then Google Earth is priceless,” he says. “But when I need something like an ‘Exterior two-story house, with little to no bushes in front, near the Vamanos Pest [the fumigation company in Breaking Bad]‘ location, the best way to do it is to walk up and down every street in the vicinity.”

“Google Earth?” muses [Nick] Marshall. “Funnily enough, it’s actually very useful if you’re looking for parking.”

The swimming pool part of that brings back memories; back in 2007 Frank posted about a pool cleaning service that used Google Earth to find potential customers.

Google Earth certainly has a lot of uses, and this is a great example of one that most people don’t think about.  Check out the full article for yourself over on The Independent website.

The post Using Google Earth to find locations for TV shows appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Google Earth is an amazing tool to visualize trends and growth when it comes to real estate.  In the past we’ve shown you some tools that use historical imagery to show how things have changed, such as Google’s Timelapse project and this impressive visualization of urban growth in Spain.

Today we wanted to show you three impressive videos that use Google Earth to show historical real estate information in a very compelling way.  They take three major american cities (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) and show the growth of them over the past 150 years.  The videos begin with a flat city, then slowly begin dropping in colored polygons for the buildings in the order in which they were built.

It’s an impressive set of videos and a very effective way to show this kind of growth.

You can read more about these on The Source website.

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