Earthware Blog

Dubai is undergoing what could be called some ’serious’ development work in the last few years. They are building entire new islands in a variety of funky shapes for the mega rich to buy holiday homes on. A downside of this is that the geographical layout changes very quickly, too quickly is seems for any of the internet mapping tools to keep up.

I was disappointed when looking at Dubai for some client Google Earth work to see how out of date all the maps are. I expected them to be updated regularly just because of how amazing the Dubai developments are, but alas this is not the case. For example take a look at the Google Earth current coverage.

You can see the 2 new ‘palm island’ developments on the map, however since then they have built the ‘World’ and another palm. I’ve found a Google Earth overlay that shows the updated development, but the overlay is a bit rough. Here is a screenshot.

A few days late in blogging this, mostly because Ive been coming up with uses for the new features that we can offer our clients. Googles latest release of Google Earth 4 Beta offers some great new inovative features:

• Timelines – allowing points, images and 3d models to be shown with timestamps and viewed using a sliding timeline bar
• Support for web mapping service (WMS) – an existing standard for queries bitmap maps (see Ogle Earth for what is actually does)
• Support for HI-Defininiation (HDTV) video output (pro version only)

There are a few other updates but these are the main ones that are exciting to Google Earth developers, especially the timeline feature.There are allready a few examples of what the timeline feature could be used for, here is one showing a building changing over many years and another that shows a car journey and photos from the windscreen view over the duration of the journey.

The real question is what other applications the timeline feature it could be used for, here at Earthware we are looking at demos to show:

• Building projects in phases so you can move the timeline and show how the project will progress
• Cruises and tours so the user can see where the tour/ship will be at different times during the cruise/tour and see relevant photos and information to each location.
• Sporting events and races – showing progress over time
• Documenting adventures and journeys in Google Earth

The timeline control is a little complex at the moment and I hope they tweak it a little for the final version, but the possibilities for time and animation certainly make a interesting challenge.

The video update is also interesting especially since the recent publicity British Airways has recieved for its new TV advert showing Google Earth footage. It was amusing to see everyone blog how amazing it was, when the the video output feature has been available for months, its just British Airways were the first large company to actually use it in an advert. HI-Definition can only help it be used more often for media projects.

It is unfortunate, with the Google Earth team being so innovative recently, that the Google Maps team don’t seem to have really done anything special recently especially when compared to the recent new Virtual Earth developments.

Microsoft have launched the latest version of Virtual Earth on http://local.live.com. Along with a bit of a redesign they have added some really neat drawing features.

You can now easily draw areas and routes that could be used by businesses to show all kinds of things like catchment area, population statistics, house prices, race routes, delivery areas, bus routes, train routes, scientific data the list is endless. To see an example of the kind of collection anyone can make click here.

Virtual Earth is now really shaping up to become an extremely powerful business mapping solution with the existing easy to use pinpoints (a feature which google have recently also added) and the new drawing tools its now even easier to create powerful maps for your website.

In the US they have also added more ‘birds eye’ views for various cities, unfortunately no more currently for the UK .

The glove has definitely now been thrown to google maps, the features and development cycle for virtual Earth is now vastly superior to that of Google Maps, as is the satellite coverage. Of course the problem in comparing Virtual Earth to Google maps, Google Earth or Yahoo maps is that Virtual Earth is not free. As I’ve already discussed on this blog there is a not particularly clear charging structure for usage of Virtual Earth when you use more than 5,000 transactions per day.

The Digitally Distributed Environments blog posted an interesting article about creating 3d Panoramas using Google Earth. I’m sure you have seen 3d panoramas before, either of the insides of buildings, or of open areas / views. This technique however produces the same effect using Google Earth’s satellite imagery.(click the image below to see the 3d Panorama using QuickTime VR)

The panoramas are created by taking a series of screen shots from within Google Earth with the view rotated around a fixed point above the map and then adding a fake sky texture. This technique could easily be used to show 3d buildings in the view as well.

Of course there is one major problem, using this technique commercially is almost certainly against Google Earth’s terms of use (see this post in their faq section). How you would go about getting permission to use these, or the costs involved I have no idea. If anyone does (google?) please let us all know.