Earthware Blog

This week has seen a further development in global web based mapping technology with Google’s announcement that it has augmented Google Earth into Google Maps, creating a 3D rendering of certain locations when used with a supported browser.

This update to Google Maps, called Earth View, enables users to view 3D images of a number of the world’s most iconic places. In the UK, these include the Houses of Parliament in London, Stonehenge and even the Lake District.

Go to Google Maps and click the ‘New!’ link in the top right-hand corner and then enable “Aerial Imagery” and click on “save changes”. Then select one of the listed examples, sit back and enjoy!

Commenting on the Google’s Lat Long blog, Google Product Manager, Peter Birch, wrote:

"Earth View offers a true three-dimensional perspective, which lets you experience mountains in full detail, 3D buildings and first-person dives beneath the ocean. The motion is fluid, and you can see the world from any viewpoint".

Coming five years after Google Earth was launched, Earth View is available through the installation of a browser plug-in it originally issued in 2008, enabling dramatic detailing using the Google Earth fly-through interface.

The Grand Canyon, as viewed with Earth View in Google Maps.

San Francisco is one area where 3D perspective of an urban view is available in real detail.

(Credit: screenshots by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Microsoft is currently working on its own 3D view of the world by enhancing its Bird’s Eye perspective in Bing Maps using the Silverlight plug-in.

Brian, Earthware’s Technical Director believes, “It is great to see these premium beta features make it into the consumer site offering some real competition to Bing’s 3D maps”.

Please feel free to contact Earthware if you are looking to explore how Google Maps, or any other web based interactive mapping, can help your business.

For the past thirty years or more, the travel industry has relied upon the trusty printed brochure to wet our appetites for holidays at home and abroad. We’ve become accustomed to the idea of thumbing through acres of paper and booking our escape to the sun based on fuzzy photographs and ‘artist’s impressions’. I wonder exactly how many holidaymakers have uttered those immortal words, “it didn’t look like that in the brochure?” during this time.

However, thanks to the massive advances made in web based mapping technology, this is all set to change. Applications such as Bing Maps World Tour, which uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and the Bing Maps mapping API, and the European Environment Agency’s Eye on the Earth website, which is built on the Windows Azure platform and Google Earth mapping are great examples of how the technology has revolutionised the way web users experience online mapping imagery. These mapping technologies have also paved the way for the travel sector to re-think how it can use the internet to present consumers with complete travel information in one place, e.g. embedded into an online travel map, to make finding and booking a holiday an enjoyable, easy experience.

Let’s take this one step further. Imagine popping into your local travel agent, or even sitting at home, and being able to interact with the screen to research and book your next holiday. The kind of technology that would enable you to do this was featured in the 2002 Hollywood movie, Minority Report. However, it’s no longer in the realm of science fiction thanks to the introduction of Microsoft Surface. Blend this technology with 3D street level mapping which is now available with Microsoft’s Streetside and Google’s Streetview and we’ve opened the door to a whole new perspective of what we can expect in the not too distant future.

95% of the UK road network has now been plotted in Google Streetview, an incredible logistical exercise on its own. You may even have seen one of the hundreds of specially rigged ‘Google Cars’ driving around capturing the imagery over the last 18 months but don’t worry, all faces and vehicle registrations have been disguised to comply with privacy laws!

This imagery means tourists and those holidaying at home can get an incredible amount of destination information, as well as being able to plan an itinerary based on the surrounding area and distances to attractions, for example, through just one application. Granted, you will only get an aerial or bird’s eye (if the mapping platform used is Microsoft’s Bing Maps) view of your holiday cottage if it’s down a private farm track (at the moment) but how about ‘walking’ around the nearest village or town? No problem.

For those of you who’d like to find out more about Bing Maps in particular, you can visit and join the Bing Maps User Group which was co-founded by Earthware’s Technical Director, Brian Norman. At one recent session, the group heard from Jim Lynn from BBC Vision, who presented “Adventures in Mapping” to give more of a taste of what we could see in the future.

Earthware’s development team is at the forefront of groundbreaking online mapping technology and new applications and is working in a number of industry sectors keen to embrace the power of interactive mapping technology to bring their business propositions to life through the internet.

Not only that, in these environmentally conscious times, it’s comforting to know this technology could help the travel industry take a huge step forward in reducing the thousands of tons of paper it uses each year.

To find out more about using Silverlight or Windows Azure technologies or the Bing Maps or Google Maps online mapping to communicate your business, please contact us.

Within hours of Google launching Google Street View imagery covering 99% of UK roads, Earthware has released their first implementation of the new imagery in commercial property portal NovaLoca.com.

The Google Street View imagery in NovaLoca.com allows users to view commercial property in the major UK cities and in smaller towns and villages right across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The user now gets an even better impression of what a property being advertised on the site is like, without having to visit it in person, making finding commercial property easier than it has ever been before.

Earthware and NovaLoca have been working together for a long time to keep NovaLoca’s property mapping well ahead of the competition. In October 2008 we implemented the very first UK street side imagery in NovaLoca’s maps for commercial property in London before Google released any of their Street View imagery in the UK. This latest addition means that Street View imagery is now a standard function of the property maps where ever you are looking for commercial property in the UK. Yet again, this means NovaLoca have beaten all their competitors by becoming the first UK commercial property website to be using this technology.

If you want to know how you can use online mapping and Google Street View in your website please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Google Maps have today launched Google StreetView imagery for the entire UK and we mean the entire UK!  Nearly a quarter of a million roads across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are now available to ‘walk’ down from your computer screen. The 360 degree pictures mean you can have a good look around as you travel down the street, and you can deep zoom into the images to see the detail (although faces and registration plates are blurred out in accordance to the privacy protection rules).

But Google have been even busier than that: they have also released Google Street View imagery covering the majority of France, Italy and Spain too.

Although Google Street View has been available in 25 major cities in the UK since March 2009, to now have Street View right across the UK is a phenomenal achievement from the Google Maps team and will be changing the way people use online maps to display geographical information in interactive maps. The StreetView maps can be embedded into any website to help businesses display their location and any geographical information on a map, immediately we see major benefits from property mapping and travel mapping.

For anyone that’s interested you can now see where all the Earthware fun happens:
View Larger Map

If you are interested in how you can use Google Maps and Google Street View to display your information then contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Google has announced the launch of the Google Tricycle. As the Google Street cars whiz through the larger roads of cities and towns around the world capturing 360 degree images of the area, there are some places they just can’t reach. This is where the Google Tricycle will come in handy: it can fit down those smaller streets around the towns and can even take Street View off-road!

Google launched their Street View imagery in the UK in March 2009 amid a storm of controversy. However, they were not the first. Earthware introduced the first customised Street Level View four months earlier in November 2008 for commercial property listings website, Novaloca.com.

One critisim of the Google Street View offering was it’s lack of coverage of minor roads. The Google trike will aim to solve this. It is currently being tested in Genoa and is expected to hit the UK shores this summer. In partnership with Visit Britain, the public will be able to vote for three landmarks they would like to see captured.  Justin Reid of Visit Britain said, “the new trike will enable us to showcase even more of Britain’s wonderful destinations and we look forward to receiving some great ideas from the public”.

The images taken by the trike will be stitched together to form a 360 tour of the location and be embedded in the existing Google Maps.

However, the Google trike is not the only technology available to develop this sort of imagery. With Microsoft’s Photosynth technology you can turn your digital images of a route, location or object into a 3 dimensional, navigatable image. Alternatively, Seety, the company behind the Street Level View imagery Earthware embedded in NovaLoca.com are offering their services for bespoke work. So if you can’t wait for the Google trike to make it to your favourite location there are a number of other options open to you.

If you could like to hear more about how Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth can help your business then contact Earthware.

The great thing about maps and I expect a reason why they are fast becoming the ‘must have’ thing in a website, is that they present information in a visually stimulating format and allow the user to interact with that information. Take Street Level View’s for an example whether you love it or loathe it, it allows you to interact with a location – you choose where to go and what to look at.

Over the next few days I will be introducing you to some other multimedia concepts that we have been working on, that can be used independently or with mapping, to give another way to display information in a visual and interactive format.

We kick off today with…

3d Virtual Tour Videos

Virtual tours are a great way to communicate a route, whether that’s a bike race, a 10km run or a travel itinerary. Using Google Earth imagery we display locations in three dimensional visual representations, giving an indication of inclines and distances, as well as picturesque views. Add information such as existing photos, videos and locality information to this by embedding it into the imagery and the user is able to really understand a location either as they navigate around on their own, or watching the animations as a video.

There are a number of ways you can use the finished product. For example:

· Embed it into a webpage as a live Google Earth animation. The user can now browse the route without needing to have Google Earth installed and open.

· Send it to customers/contacts in an email

· Add it to DVD marketing materials

· Display it on a screen such as in TV advertising or a one off broadcast or at a trade show or exhibition

For more information about 3d virtual tours, please contact Earthware

Tomorrow… Advanced interactive mapping.

We came across some of the interesting stuff that lastminute have been doing using Google Earth.  lastminute have an experimental arm it seems called lastminute labs who are big fans of Google Earth and have been doing some stuff with Google Earth pretty much since it came on the market.

Some good examples include:

Flight sales through lastminute in the last minute – shows the start and end points and a line between them.  Using only the last 60 secs of purchase keeps the map nice and clean.

LastMinute products – this places the products that lastminute offer in their location in the world with interactive icons that allow you to access more information before being passed on to the part of lastminute that allows you to book.

We like companies that are innovating using mapping and congratulate the lastminute labs team!

With government claims that most people back today’s wind farm announcements, and the Guardian citing a new NOP poll showing 80% favour their use and 64% are happy to live within 5km of a development,

Why does it still take so long to push through planning?

Residents seem to be unable to visualise new developments and feel pushed out of the planning process.  In the recent example of a proposed farm in Stonish Hill, a ‘Vscapes’ presentation (virtual landscape) for us non techies, was used to clearly engage local residents and offer an accurate depiction of the proposed development, for more info click here. Earthware, the company commissioned to prepare the presentation, created scale 3D models and then embed these with Google Earth, allowing navigation around the proposed development, and demonstrating accurate views from any location.

If the government are going to reach their stated targets, further support and more efficient processes like that used in the Stonish Hill wind farm will come to the forefront in the mind set of both local planning authorities, but perhaps more pertinently with developers, as long drawn out applications result in lower ROI, but with no major increase in government funding these additional costs would have to be raised by customers through higher bills.

A recent Sustainable Development commission report cited community engagement and environmental impacts as two key factors in the future success of wind power development in the UK, and with many applications being rejected much like the proposal for the Drummuir Estate wind farm, declined as Lord Gill said there was "no substance" to the council’s submission on the cumulative impact of the proposal, and with the 2020 deadline outlined by the government it is pertinent for developers to take notice of the added value a Vscapes presentation offers.

This is what John Hanke, head of the Google Earth Unit said in an article published on the Financial Times website entitled “Way to go? Mapping looks to be the web’s next big thing”. Does this explain why, as the article also states, “a map is about to become the interface to many things people do on the internet”. The big names in mapping products are racing to become the one to provide the interface for these maps and are even driving city streets to collect street level information. Some are even designing and building special cameras and flying over cities to gather 3D images.

The article explores the upcoming potential takeovers of Navteq by Nokia and TeleAtlas by TomTom and what that is likely to mean. It proposes that there is a ‘3D arms race’ in progress with Microsoft and Google competing to own this space (see link for how Earthware is using 3D models in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth). The article, and contributors such as John Hanke, Head of the Google Earth unit and Erik Jorgensen from Microsoft explore how the combination of technologies such as 3d and mobile phones will shape the internet usage and see mapping make searching a more visual experience, especially when cross selling products.

So what is Earthware’s view? We very much agree with the premise of the article that:

· Maps provide a concrete visual representation of a context and,

· Maps allow the user to go to one place and find all the information they could want to know about it, providing a one-stop-shop.

At Earthware we are already seeing the benefits mapping solutions bring to the user. Our mapping solution for the property market has greatly enhanced the effectiveness of our clients’ website as well as the users experience as they search for property (see www.london-executive.com or www.wowproperty.co.uk for examples). With the current development of our mapping solution for the travel market (to be released later this year) we expect to see mapping solutions in all geographically based market places in the coming years, proving the value of mapping across a number of market places.

The possibilities are nearly endless for mapping and mapping products especially with new technology expanding in terms of GPS availability on phones and cameras etc. The development in mapping technologies we are seeing now are just the beginning and to be honest where it could go simply makes the mind boggle!

To read the article in full and discover just some of the mapping possibilities of the not too distance future see Financial Times and click here for more information on Earthware’s interactive mapping

Using details from a local planning application for a proposed wind farm, Earthware provided a Vscapes presentation to aid in the application showing a 3d scale virtual representation of the completed site in Google Earth including support structures and access roads.

To download the Google Earth file containing this project and experience the development yourself please click here, you will need to install Google Earth before viewing this file by clicking here.

We are pleased to say that the outcome of the application was successful, and the Vscapes presentation was praised as an effective tool to present and understand the proposed development.

As part of this video, 3D models of wind turbines and a local structure were built to scale to give a real world comparison between the sizes of each.

We at Earthware believe that this style of presentation can be highly effective for a range of environmental planning or pre-visualisation, as it accurately shows how a future structure will appear in the environment and the visual effect it will have on the landscape.  This has been previously demonstrated with our background in visualisations for off-plan property developments.

For more information about how Vscapes can help your planning process visit www.earthware.co.uk/vscapes or call us on +44 (0)845 642 9880.