My Google Map Blog

Tag: GE Plugin

Google Earth API /plugin finally coming to an end

by Timothy Whitehead on Dec.13, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

Google has announced that they are finally shutting down the Google Earth API /plugin on Wednesday, January 11, 2017. They first announced its deprecation in December 2014, giving it a year. In December 2015, they gave it a temporary reprieve, which is finally running out.

The Google Earth API is based on an old technology called the NPAPI plugin framework and is primarily intended to allow Google Earth to be run in a browser and controlled with JavaScript. However, it has been used in some desktop apps as well. The NPAPI plugin framework is considered outdated and insecure by most browser vendors, and some, including Google Chrome, have dropped it altogether. Others, such as Firefox (32-bit), allow you to use it but only after specifically allowing the plugin to run.

We will miss it, as it was a good way to access information about historical imagery and we used to create imagery update maps using it. However, since June, Google has not updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer (other than the recent addition of the global Landsat/Sentinel mosaics)

Google Earth 4
At the same time, Google is ending support for Google Earth 4. Anyone running Google Earth 4 will no longer be able to access imagery from January 11, 2017. The current latest version is 7.1.7.2606

If you absolutely need an older version, you can download older versions going back to Google Earth 5.0 here.

Here’s hoping Google can come up with a new Google Earth API that allows us to control Google Earth and query its data.


One of the uses we had for the Google Earth API was studying [historical imagery density](One of http://www.gearthblog.com/tag/historical-imagery-density).

The post Google Earth API /plugin finally coming to an end appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, more...

Making use of the Google Earth API

by Timothy Whitehead on Jul.05, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

Although the Google Earth API was officially deprecated back in December 2014, Google chose not to shut it down on schedule in December 2015 and have instead kept it running. Although you should not design websites around it as most browsers no-longer support the technology it is based on (NPAPI), it can still be a very useful tool for particular purposes.

Today we are sharing a tool based on the Google Earth API that we developed for our own purposes, but think others might find useful. If you have a collection of placemarks and want to know whether or not Google Earth has relevant imagery, rather than switching to ‘historical imagery’ then checking them one by one in Google Earth, this tool can do much of the work for you.

As an example of what it might be useful for, we took this page on Wikipedia that lists the locations of all the tornados in the United States from January to March 2016. We used the provided coordinates to create placemarks in Google Earth. We then used the tool to generate a new KML which shows which placemarks have imagery from 2016.


Placemarks with imagery from 2016 are highlighted in green.

It is not perfect in this particular situation as it does not tell us whether the imagery in question was captured before or after the particular tornado. To achieve that, we would have to find a way to include the tornado date in the original KML file. But it does considerably cut down on the number of placemarks we should check if we want to find signs of tornado damage. You can get the above KML file here. Keep in mind that many of the tornados were very week and did almost no damage.

In order to use this tool, you need to open this page in Firefox which, as of this writing, still supports the Google Earth API. The first time you open the page, you must click the link that says ‘Activate Google Earth’, then choose ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup. Then refresh the page.

Next, select the KML file containing the placemarks you want to use, and enter a date in the space provided and click “Get Dates”. The tool will check the latest imagery date for each location and when complete will download a KML file which you can view in Google Earth. Note that each placemark takes two seconds because we find that the Google Earth API is a bit unreliable if rushed. The resulting KML file includes all placemarks from the original file and puts the date of the most recent imagery in the placemark description. In addition, it colour-codes the placemarks yellow and green depending on whether or not the latest imagery is before or after the date provided below.


Status:
KML file:

Date: (yyyy/mm/dd)



The post Making use of the Google Earth API appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off:, , more...

Tips for creating historical imagery animations

by Timothy Whitehead on Jun.09, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

This post is some tips for creating historical imagery animations using the ‘Historical Imagery Tour Maker’ we released in yesterday’s post.

Tilt

The Google Earth plugin, like the default setting in Google Earth, tilts the view towards the horizontal as you zoom in close to the ground. In Google Earth you can stop that behaviour in “Tools -> Options -> Navigation -> Navigation”. For the plugin, there is no access to the settings, so, if you want your animation to be from directly overhead, be sure to press ‘u’ on your keyboard to reset the tilt after you have zoomed in to your area of interest. For a list of other Google Earth keyboard shortcuts see this website

Cache the imagery

If you do not have very fast internet, set the ‘step’ to several seconds and click ‘play’ and allow it to cycle through all the imagery in order to cache the imagery before you begin. In addition, when creating your final tour, you can create two versions, one with a long ‘step’ to be run first to pre-cache the imagery, then another to play it at the desired speed.

Maximum speed

If you use a step less than about 750 milliseconds, then Google Earth cannot keep up and will not show all the historical imagery when playing the tour. We are not sure whether this varies depending on your computer’s speed.

Recording Video

We have found that the built-in recording functionality (Tools->Movie Maker) of Google Earth Pro works rather well. However, it removes the historical imagery time bar and the status bar, so you cannot see the dates in the resulting footage. We used the highest quality settings and 10 frames per second. One nice feature of the Movie Maker is that it waits for imagery to load.

Before you start recording, make sure the tour is not set to auto repeat or the recording never stops.

Screen recording software can also be used. Use F11 to go full screen then hide the side bar and tool bar. We don’t know of a way to hide the menu.

Here are a couple of tours we have created:


Get the Google Earth tour here


Get the Google Earth tour here

The post Tips for creating historical imagery animations appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, more...

Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API

by Timothy Whitehead on Jun.08, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

There are several different ways to automate animated historical imagery that we have explored in the past.

The first, and easiest, is to use a Google Earth Tour that simply changes the date by a given increment at a set frequency. So you could, for example, change the date by one month every second. In this post we presented some JavaScript to help with creating such tours. The main disadvantage of this technique is that Google Earth’s historical imagery is not regular and so you end up with periods of no imagery changes, and some skipped images. The technique does have the advantage of accurately representing the passage of time.

The second technique is to obtain the list of imagery dates using the Google Earth API and then use a tour to change the date, showing each existing image at a given frequency. This results in an animation that shows all the images in a given time range. We presented a tool for doing this in this post.

An outstanding problem that occurs with both techniques, is that Google Earth imagery is often not the best quality so you get an animation that includes some images with excessive cloud cover or updates that only cover part of the area of interest and do not look good. In addition, if you are trying to show change over time, you may not want images that are too close together in time if no significant differences can be seen between them. When we manually create animations for the blog we choose each image to include.

Some time ago we created a tool for creating Google Earth Tours that include or exclude images of your choice. We created it at the time the Google Earth API was expected to be shut down, so we chose not to share it. However, Google has so far kindly kept the Google Earth API alive, so we think people may find it useful.

It requires a browser that supports the Google Earth API, which, as far as we know is only Firefox. So, you will need to open this post in Firefox, and click ‘Activate Google Earth’ and then ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup.

Instructions

To begin, zoom in to the location where you want to create the animation. Then click ‘Get dates’. The tool will obtain the list of dates available for that location. Note that for locations with a large number of images, this may take a bit of time.

For most animations, you will want to start the animation at a specific point in time. Go to the date you wish to start at in the Google Earth plugin, then click ‘Set first date’. This will exclude all dates before this date.

Now go through each image deciding whether to include it in your animation or not. You can either select images with the plugin or use the ‘Next’ button to cycle through images. If you definitely want an image, click ‘Include date’, if you definitely do not want an image, click ‘Exclude date’. The tool has two modes. You can choose to select specific dates to include in your animation, or select specific dates to exclude. If you are only removing a few images, then the latter mode is easier.

Once you have gone through the imagery you can see how it will look by clicking the ‘Play’ button. If you are satisfied with the results, set speed of the animation by adjusting ‘Step’ which is the time between frames, then click ‘Download Tour’. You can now open the downloaded file in Google Earth and play the tour.

(warning! clears included and excluded lists)

     loop.    Step (milliseconds):


Use ‘includes’ only
Use ‘includes’ and ‘dates available’

Included dates Dates available Excluded dates

The post Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , more...

Where next after the Google Earth API?

by Timothy Whitehead on Dec.02, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

With the end of the Google Earth API imminent we are having a look at what various sites that depend, or used to depend on the Google Earth API are doing about it. Earlier this year we did a showcase of sites that use the Google Earth API and we will have a look at a selection of those sites.

The first is Rally Navigator. It is a comprehensive online application for creating rally road books, which are a set of instructions used by rally drivers and their co-pilots to map out a course and know what is coming next at each turn of the road. Knowing that the Google Earth API was coming to an end, the developers of Rally Navigator redesigned it to use Google Maps instead. Although it now lacks 3D effects we do not believe it has lost any essential features as a result of the conversion and has gained more features with time. So if you are a rally driver (or co-pilot) then you should definitely check it out. It has both free and paid for versions.

Next up is GETeach. This site was converted to use Google Maps even before we reviewed it earlier this year, but they left the Google Earth version online and it can still be found here. GETeach is designed to use as much screen space as possible for the maps, which leaves very little space for menus or other information telling you what it does. So the first thing you should do is view the help page to get an idea of its features and how to access them.

We do feel that the loss of the Google Earth API in this case does mean the loss of a lot of useful features that simply cannot be replaced by Google Maps, notably the loss of historical imagery and 3D imagery. Although Google Maps does have 3D imagery, it is not accessible via the Google Maps API as is used for this site. Even with the loss of the Google Earth API, however, it is still a great site and would be very useful in the classroom, so be sure to check it out.

Next is Flightradar24, a flight tracking website that shows the live locations of flights around the globe. It used to have a 3D view, which used the Google Earth plugin to show a model of an aircraft in the correct location on its route. They currently have a message stating that due to the demise of the Google Earth plugin, they are currently working on a replacement 3D experience. We will have to wait till they are done to see how it compares to the old Google Earth API experience.

Last but not least is GEFS Online, a popular flight simulator based on the Google Earth API. As far as we can tell, no significant development work has been done on the site for quite some time, with the last blog entry being nearly two years old. We can only guess that there are no current plans to move to an alternative platform and that the site will die along with the Google Earth API.

The post Where next after the Google Earth API? appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , , more...

Wild Dogs and the Google Earth API

by Timothy Whitehead on Nov.23, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

We recently came across this interesting article about how researchers have created a land cover map of East Africa, differentiating the areas with human land cover vs areas that remain natural. The map will be useful for studying many different species of wildlife in the area, but it has already proved useful in the study of African Wild Dogs.

The map was created using a tool called GE Grids created by Andy Stanish and available here. It creates a grid over a specified area and you can select or de-select squares in the grid. So, for the East Africa map in the article above researchers looked at the satellite imagery and selected areas that showed signs of human habitation or land use. Very simple but remarkably useful. This highlights the usefulness of the Google Earth API, which Google plans to shut down next month. In this particular case the tool does not use historical imagery or other features unique to Google Earth, so it would be relatively easy to convert the tool to use Google Maps instead. However, there are plenty of other applications and tools out there which will have no real alternative after the Google Earth API comes to an end.

The post Wild Dogs and the Google Earth API appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , more...

Tour maker with the Google Earth API

by Timothy Whitehead on Nov.13, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

With the end of life of the Google Earth API approaching, Paul van Dinther of PlanetInAction.com has decided to release a tool he created for his own use that uses the Google Earth plugin for making Google Earth Tours. Paul van Dinther has created a number of games based on the Google Earth API that we have featured on this blog, possibly the most sophisticated of which is a ship simulator. When he realized the Google Earth API would eventually be shut down Paul decided to base the next version, Ships 2 Career, on Google Maps instead. It will lack the 3D that the Google Earth API provides but we believe it will still be a great game and popular with ship enthusiasts. You can follow the development on his Google+ page.

The tour maker can be found here. To use it you will need to open it in a browser that still supports the Google Earth plugin. We tested it in Firefox but we believe it should also work in Safari.

Paul has provided the following instructions for using it:

Navigate to the location where you want the tour to start. (Sorry, there is no find location).

Set up your first start view exactly as you would like it to appear. You can use all the Google Earth navigation methods to set up your view.

Click the “Add view” button to add the first view to your view list. By default the speed at that point is 10 meters per second (more about that later).

Set up your next view and click “Add view” again. You need to add the third point before the track is drawn. Make sure you keep the spacing between the points reasonably even, because otherwise the cubic spline (a smooth curve between points) becomes hard to control and starts to do funny loops.

Now you have a spline with 3 points. You can left click and drag any of the numbered view markers in the Google Earth plugin to adjust the path. The spline will flip to a low resolution spline while you are manipulating the points.

Each point is represented in the view list in the right sidebar. It shows the point index, an input box for speed in metres per second, an input box for the view altitude and a delete link. You can click on any entry in the list and the Google Earth plugin view will teleport to that view.

IMPORTANT: While on that view you can adjust your camera tilt and heading (but not roll). You do this by holding down CTRL and left-mouse-drag the view (standard Google Earth behaviour). The new camera orientation will be stored for that view point as long as the camera latitude and longitude coordinates did not change. Both heading and tilt are controlled via the spline.

The altitude is also controlled by the spline. You can change the altitude of a point by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the point. Alternatively you can change the altitude in the view list (second input box).

Timing: Each point will have a speed defined for it in meters per second. The speed varies smoothly as it is also controlled by the spline. However, it is possible to lock the duration of the tour to a precise time by entering the duration in the “Duration (sec)” input box. All the speeds are then scaled to match total duration. Clear the Duration field if you don’t want the speeds to be scaled. By default the duration is set to 60 seconds.

Once you hare happy with your track you can save it by clicking on “Save project” this causes a file with the project name to be generated and placed in your download folder. Use this file later if you want to work on this track. To load a project, refresh the page and click “Choose File” and select the file you just saved. Crude but there still is no decent local file implementation in browsers.

You can specify a Field of View (FOV) for the tour. The default Google Earth FOV is 60 degrees but you can adjust that. FOV is not animated and applies to the whole tour.

Once you have your tour and the path looks reasonable, the tour can be tested by clicking “Test kml”. The program will generate KML and show it in the text area under the view list. You can copy and paste the KML straight into Google Earth Desktop without turning it into a file. The test feature will also load the KML data into the plugin and the tour starts automatically. “Generate KML” does the same but doesn’t start a tour in the plugin.

The “Make project” button is not relevant for you. It produces data that I import into my own software that translates the tour for each of my 9 screens.

“Rebuild spline”, “update track” and “rebuild track” are debug functions. However, if you update the altitude of a point in the view list you will want to click “Rebuild track” to see the changes.

Paul also says:

This has to be the ugliest program ever written. But it does the job I need it to do. It’s not very user friendly but I produced amazing animations with it.”

The post Tour maker with the Google Earth API appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , more...

Google Earth API – one more month to live

by Timothy Whitehead on Nov.12, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

In December last year Google announced the deprecation of the Google Earth API (also known as the Google Earth Plug-in). It is set to stop working one month from now on December 12th, 2015. The documentation page for the Google Earth API states that it will be shut down on that date.

The reason Google has given for terminating the Google Earth API product is that it is reliant on an ageing technology called NPAPI which is not considered secure and most browsers are dropping support for it or have already done so. In addition, it was never available on mobile platforms.

Google Chrome never included support for NPAPI in its 64-bit version released in September, 2014. The 32-bit version of Chrome gradually dropped support for NPAPI (and with it the Google Earth API) initially making it harder to access in April, 2015, and finally dropping support altogether with the release of Version 45 in October.

We believe Safari still supports it.

It still works in Firefox and we still find many uses for it, such as for finding recent imagery releases. Download this KML file to see the location of imagery in Google Earth that was captured in November (less than 12 days old!).

The Google Earth API has many great uses. We showcased a number of them in this series of posts earlier this year. We at GEB believe Google should consider allowing the GE plugin to continue to work at least until a suitable replacement is in place (with the next version of Google Earth, perhaps?).

If a complete replacement is not planned, Google should consider making some of the services available via the Maps API or entirely new APIs. For many of the most common uses, simply adding a few more features to the Google Maps API would make a big difference. Currently it is not possible to use the 3D imagery or tilt the view in the JavaScript Google Maps API, although it is possible with the Android version of the API. We use the historical imagery information quite a lot, which could be provided as a standalone API.


My flying skills could use some work. GEFS Online is a popular flight simulator based on the Google Earth API.

The post Google Earth API – one more month to live appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, more...

Ten Years of Amazing Google Earth Visualizations

by Frank Taylor on Jun.29, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

Google Earth was first released on June 28, 2005. Now, in celebration of the 10th Anniversary of Google Earth’s release, we would like to share just a few examples of the best user applications of Google Earth over the years. As any regular reader of this blog can tell you, Google Earth is a fantastic way to share content and tell stories about the Earth (and other planets and places). The desktop versions of Google Earth (GE) include a lot of features for annotating the map including basic placemarks, GPS tracks, image overlays (for maps, weather satellite photos and more), photo placemarks, time animations, 3D models, and much more. After over a billion downloads of Google Earth, millions of people have shared a vast array of content, and continue to do so after 10 years of the world’s most accurate 3D globe. Google also added many powerful features to GE over the years to allow people to create applications via their browser-based plugin and API, time animations, and even a scripting tour mode inside Google Earth.

Millions of people have found all kinds of strange and interesting sights when viewing Google Earth imagery. A few examples include: marriage proposals on roofs, heart-shaped lakes, guitar-shaped pools, African animals, bizarre hidden military objects, and many more. Thousands of people have found planes in flight and there’s a huge collection curated by the Google Earth Community.

Unique sights

Unique sights

Google Earth is a great way to tell stories in a geo-spatial context. Want to read about the harrowing tale, and see the locations, of explorers in the early 1900s whose ship was trapped in ice in Antarctica and the successful rescue by their daring captain who managed to get help from thousands of miles away? Want to see and hear the places and stories from a famous book called “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum?

Shackleton and Slocum

Shackleton and Slocum

Did you know Google Earth has a built-in flight simulator? Very few people realize just how fluid you can move inside the program. You can fly while looking at the world’s most complete and current model of the Earth. In fact, back in 2007 when I produced a cool demonstration of the first detailed terrain model of the Swiss Alps, by mimicing a video of a Swiss Figher Jet through the mountains, it impressed Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt (now Chairman) so much that Google decided to produce the flight simulator mode. An even better way to fly in Google Earth is with a 3D mouse called SpaceNavigator which gives you the ultimate control.

Flying in GE

Flying in GE

The time animation feature, which Google added a year after it was first released, empowered all sorts of dynamic content and data visualizations. For example, one guy produced an animation of the clouds of Jupiter in motion. Another classic example was a visualization of Hurricane Katrina showing just when it grew the strongest and shows satellites views as it approached and struck New Orleans.

Animations

The advent of the browser plugin version of Google Earth enabled developers to create applications using Google Earth. One of my favorite scientific applications is one that helps you visualize eclipses when the Moon and Earth dance with the Sun. Google produced a cool demonstration of the plugin with Monster Milktruck. But, my favorite is a game which lets you play like you are doing a lunar landing of the NASA Apollo 11 Eagle on Tranquility Base – complete with sound (see video).

Plugins

One of the most important uses of Google Earth has been to help raise awareness of issues facing humanity and the Earth’s environment. Google formed Google Earth Outreach with a team of top Google engineers to help organizations use Google Earth to create tools and visualizations to highlight issues such as environmentally destructive coal mining, effects of massive deforestation, dangers and conditions of coral reefs, and human genocide. In 2009 Google introduced the Google Earth Ocean layers to help raise awareness and explore the Ocean and highlight issues like overfishing, climate change, and pollution.

GE Outreach

Google Earth has been a fantastic tool used throughout the world for a multitude of purposes. It has been used in schools countless times to help teachers educate the minds of the young about the Earth. And Google Earth is the best way to explore and learn about places you may never reach otherwise, or to help you plan your own travels to those places. Google Earth has been one of the most popular applications on Earth. We hope Google will continue to develop and further advance this fantastic tool for everyone.

Google Earth 2015

Google Earth 2015

The post Ten Years of Amazing Google Earth Visualizations appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , more...

10 years of Google Earth innovation

by Timothy Whitehead on Jun.29, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

In 2004 Google bought startup Keyhole Inc. whose main product was a virtual globe known as Keyhole Earthviewer. On June 28th, 2005, ten years ago yesterday, Google released the renamed Google Earth 3.0 for free (there were still paid versions with some extra features). Since then Google Earth has become one of the best known and most used applications in the world. Today, in honour of the 10 year anniversary of Google Earth we are looking at some of the key features and innovations that make Google Earth such a great product.

Keyhole Markup Language
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is named for Google Earth’s predecessor Keyhole Earthviewer. It is a file format designed to make it easy to share geographic information. Google helped to make it into a standard and it is now maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It remains the standard format for sharing information via Google Earth.

Network links and geotagged photos
A very useful feature of KML is the called a network link. Amongst other things it allows developers to show Placemarks unique to the location on earth that you are looking at in Google Earth, which makes very large datasets possible. In 2005 someone created a network link that showed geotagged photos from Flickr.

Panaromio
In early 2006, the above Flickr network link was temporarily not working and photo sharing site Panaromio filled the gap with their own network link. Later that year Google made the Panaromio network link into a layer. The result was that Panaromio grew quickly and in May 2007 was bought by Google. More recently, Google has been considering merging Panaromio into Google Views, but due to a petition by the Panaromio community, that plan has been put on hold.

Street View
First introduced as part of Google Maps in May 2007, Street View consists of panoramic photos like Panaromio, but systematically captured at regular intervals by driving along a street with a special camera. Street View was integrated into Google Earth 4.2 in April 2008. Street View coverage continues to expand, and in many places is recaptured at regular intervals. Find a map of current Street View coverage here. A portable Street View camera called the Trekker was developed in 2012 and has been used to capture many off-road locations. Later that year an underwater version was produced, which has since been used to capture underwater imagery in a number of locations around the globe.

Historical imagery
First introduced with version 5 in February 2009, the ‘historical imagery’ feature gives the user access to Google’s enormous archive of imagery for each location. ‘Historical imagery’ is a misnomer in that newer imagery than is found in the default layer can often be found. This extremely useful feature is unique to Google Earth and is not implemented in Google maps.

3D Buildings and other 3D models
Google Earth does not just show satellite and aerial imagery, but includes 3D terrain as well as 3D models of buildings and more. Google has tried many different techniques to try and get the whole world modelled in 3D. One early effort included buying a modelling program called SketchUp, releasing a free version of it and encouraging users to create building models. Anyone could create a model and upload it to the 3D warehouse, and if approved, it would be put into Google Earth for all to see. Google also tried another technique known as ‘Building Maker’ that allowed users to create 3D models out of 45 degree imagery. Google has also at various times purchased large sets of 3D imagery of cities and placed them in Google Earth.

Google eventually decided that the manual modelling approach was too slow and required considerable resources for quality control. In 2012 Google sold Sketchup and soon after announced a program of automatically generating 3D imagery via stereophotogrammetry from aerial imagery. A year later they stopped accepting new submissions of 3D models from the 3D warehouse and have since been rolling out 3D imagery at an ever increasing pace. Here at GEB we maintain a KML file that shows both current 3D coverage and a timeline of when the 3D was first added to Google Earth.

Sky, Mars and Moon
In 2007 Google added the Google Sky mode to Google Earth. This allows you to turn Google Earth into a basic astronomy application. Although there are probably better specialist applications out there for astronomers, Google Sky is a great way for the ordinary person to learn more about astronomy and view some great astronomical imagery in context.
In February 2009 Google Mars was released as part of Version 5. Later that year on July 9th in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Google Moon was added. The Sky, Mars and Moon modes come with a wealth of added information in the form of layers.

So far the Earth, Sky, Mars and Moon modes are the only ones available in Google Earth. However, with the appropriate imagery and a simple KML file you can easily turn the Earth into another planet or even into the Sun.

Ocean Floor
Google in general does not put satellite imagery of the oceans into Google Earth unless there is something of particular interest. Instead, a shaded relief map of the ocean floor is displayed. Initially it was just a flat image at sea level, but from Version 5 Google Earth has a 3D model of the ocean floor and you can ‘fly’ under the ocean surface and look at the underwater relief. The ocean floor map is being continually improved, with data from multiple sources being combined. There are also a number of layers dedicated to the oceans, as well as underwater Street View.

Layers and third party content
Google Earth is a lot more than just imagery and mapping information. The built in layers provide a wealth of information geographically displayed. Many of the layers are provided by third party organisations. In addition, with KML it is possible for individuals or organizations to share information which you can then save to your ‘My Places’ and have as your own personal ‘layers’ collection. Just recently Google has added a layer simply labelled ‘Coming soon’, suggesting a new layer or layers are about to be added.

All layers turned on
Information overload. Turning on all the layers shows just how much information is available – and this is despite a clever algorithm that limits the number of icons shown by each layer.

Flight Simulator
In September 2006 Google Earth introduced ‘G-Force Mode’, which allowed a user with a joystick or other controller to navigate around Google Earth in similar fashion to a flight simulator. The next year, in August 2007, a proper ‘flight simulator mode’ was introduced. Since then, various third parties have implemented improvements or completed replacements to give a much more sophisticated flight simulator experience. The best of these is probably GEFS Online, which is based on the Google Earth plugin.

Liquid Galaxy
In 2008, Google showcased a setup with 8 screens set up in a 360 degree booth all showing Google Earth in a synchronised fashion to give an immersive experience. They have since published instructions for building a similar set-up and anyone can create their own with multiple computers and screens.

Google Earth API/plugin
In 2006 Google provided an Application Program Interface (API) based on Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) technology, which allowed programmers to control Google Earth from another program. On Mac OS X there was also an undocumented API for AppleScript. Later, Google release the Google Earth browser plugin, which has a JavaScript API. It also provided sample code to show how to use it, including the very popular Monster Milktruck driving simulator. However, the Google Earth plugin is based on NPAPI, which is now ageing technology and considered a security risk. As a result, browsers are dropping support for it and Google has deprecated the Google Earth API.

Imagery and database size
Google Earth features satellite imagery and aerial imagery. Most of the imagery comes from third parties, including satellite imaging companies and governments. However, Google now collects quite a lot of aerial imagery themselves.

Google has not made the size of the Google Earth database public. In 2006 we estimated it to be over 150 terabytes. The quantity of imagery has increased dramatically since then, so will be in the petabytes by now. And that is not including Street View imagery and the need to replicate over many servers to provide good performance.

The post 10 years of Google Earth innovation appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , , more...

Looking for something?

Use the form below to search the site:

Still not finding what you're looking for? Drop a comment on a post or contact us so we can take care of it!

Visit our friends!

A few highly recommended friends...