Tag: googleearth

Intel Game for Google Earth

Called Mars Sucks, the game really just involves navigating to specific locations based on a series of clues, whereupon your spaceship starts blowing up the invading Martian craft you’ve found. Intel’s account of making the game is interesting, though. They used the Google Earth client and server, the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a Web server and PHP5. They’ve made the source code freely available

Sim NYC

Elliot Hanson is recreating the entirety of New York City pixel by dimetric pixel in SimCity. The interview has some stunning images, but there’s even more on Elliot’s own blog, The New York City Journals. I especially like how some projects are seasonal or event-driven, animated by scripts built into the objects — for example, there is a Thanksgiving day parade

musing on sim city / ge mashups

Panoramas in Google Earth?

What would be more interesting to me is if they can use some of the more sophisticated image-based rendering approaches, especially the idea of plenoptic warping of images — e.g., take a gigipixel sphere and warp it such that it’s image data could be used for a much larger set of POVs with a more correct 3D feel. I doubt they’ll do anything so fancy at first. But there’s plenty of room to grow. My guess is that the first version will show some iconic form of the gigapixel spheres that you can click on and fly “into,” taking over your mouse controls until you click out and back to the Earth. Even with just that much, it’ll make for a good experience if they handle the controls properly.

how the 360 panoramas of old fit into GE from a tech perspective

3D Buenos Aires

i wonder if there is a rights framework in place to make some of these layers default layers?

This is the entire Federal district of Buenos Aires with complete highway system, the main roads and all of the remaining roads in the city. This file includes a large 3d portion of the downtown area and main buildings in Buenos Aires. It also includes the entire subway system of Buenos Aires. This file has a lot of 3d buildings with rich characteristics created with google earth polygons and also has some of the buildings and structures that are currently in construction in the downtown area.

Google Earth Integration

What might the implications of such a directive be for Google Earth and Maps? There are many opportunities for their integration with other services in Google’s constellation of products — and in the case of SketchUp and Picasa, such integration is already very visible. Other projects may well be underway, but that shouldn’t stop us from making our own little matrix of Google services and speculating on other ways in which geospatial data might come to infuse Google. So here they are then, the A-to-Y of Google services that have the potential for integration with Earth and Maps. let’s look at the current state of their integration and some scenarios for what could be.

some pretty good ideas in there