geo2web.com

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• Australia, Japan get Street View: Amazing — Australia is now smothered in blue Street View lines in Google Maps — including some of the most out-of-the-way places you can imagine:

  View Larger Map

  

  The Australian’s take: “Privacy advocates say Google’s gone too far,” though not, it turns out, Australia’s Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner, which thinks Google’s approach is fair dinkum enough. Japan too gets some of its main cities covered. Thanks to Claudia Carvalho for the tip.

• Olym-pics not for the Chinese: Google’s recently updated satellite imagery of the brand-new Olympic stadiums in Beijing — which would provide ample opportunity for the Chinese to feel proud — is alas not available to ordinary Chinese, as inside the Great Chinese Firewall Google’s Chinese-language Ditu Maps service does not have a satellite imagery layer. Because, you know, all those domestic terrorists would never dream of using a proxy server to maps.google.com.
• OneGeology outputs to KML: It turns out that OneGeology, previously flagged on Ogle Earth but not tested due to browser limitations, outputs to KML, as Hypocentre points out Now that I’ve had access to IE7 for a bit, I can confirm that the exported view-based network link works great in Google Earth. All Points Blog also lauds the data, but comments that the site’s technical underpinnings is a bit dated. As far as I’m concerned, the KML links for the regional layers serve all my needs — it would be great to offer them as a list of options that don’t depend on a small subset of browsers or the map view — I know where Africa is:-) Oh and a KML layer with the key would make it perfect.

  

• 3DXplorer - new Java-based virtual world: Serendipitously, just a few days after Avi Bar-Zeev clarifies the difference between two different kind of “browser-based” 3D virtual worlds/globes (one kind requires a plugin be installed, the other relies on the browser’s own resources — which is a much harder feat to pull off) an avatar-driven virtual world of the second kind is announced: 3DXplorer. Tantalizingly, it supports COLLADA models of the kind made by SketchUp and found in Google 3D Warehouse. In other words, you can create your own virtual worlds on your own website, populate it with existing 3D content, and let anyone with a free 3DXplorer account visit. That could well be a winning formula, with a free hosting option for low-traffic sites and paid options that are competitive with Second Life, depending on usage patterns. It runs in java 1.6, which alas Apple has been tardy shipping as a default with OS X (it’s still at 1.5). The main constraint, I suspect: It doesn’t look as slick as Second Life.
• Mapufacture + GeoCommons: Geoweb pioneer Mapufacture, with its early support for syndicated georeferenced content via GeoRSS, is being acquired by FortiusOne, which is democratizing access to complex GIS databases via its GeoCommons platform. As Mapufacture’s Mikel Maron, Andrew Turner and FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman explain it, the two services are complementary and hence a perfect fit — Sean Gorman:
  

  The long term vision has been to eventually fuse the personal and dynamic data of the GeoWeb (long tail) [Mapufacture] with the static and statistical data of GIS (short tail) [Geocommons].

  I think it’s wonderful that there is consolidation afoot among the social geoentrepreneurs — there are some very big fish in the geospatial pond.

• Earthmine update: O’Reilly Radar updates us on progress with Earthmine, which is working on an API to integrate its “Street View on steroids” into third party web sites. Don’t know about Earthmine yet? You need to check out this video.
• Landsat to go free: Announced today: 35 years of archived Landsat imagery will be made freely available on the web by the end of 2008. The U.S. Geological Survey will be hosting the data, which is good news — the USGS is an enthusiastic adopter of KML for many of its other projects. Depending on how comprehensively this dataset is integrated with Google Earth et. al., we’ll soon be able to browse the Earth in time as well as in space.

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Every now and again work comes to your attention that makes you think ‘wow’ - Daden Ltd have imported Google Maps into Second Life and it has just eaten up most of our morning.

The movie below illustrates the highlights of their work and our exploration:

Music by Destri.

Second Life is still a hard sell to local councils or local authorities, Daden’s work with Birmingham City Council is certainly interesting and we applaud the progress so far.

As for issues of copyright with regards Google Maps/Imagery in Second Life, that raises a whole different issue between cross platform usage. We cant see Google sending a cease and desist unlike the Ordnance Survey with our Second Life work…

See Daden Ltd for more info, thanks to Mal Burns and his excellent Twitter feed for the heads up.

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Posted by Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist

Back in March we announced the Google Cities in 3D Program, which invites local governments to share their 3D data with the public by adding a model of their city to Google Earth. The good news is that we are now extending this program with localised websites to encourage governments in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands to share their data with us. The Cities in 3D Program provides local governments, community groups, and educational institutions with tools and information for uploading their data to Google Earth.

We have developed tools to make it as easy as possible for local governments to share information with their citizens, who will be able to view and explore the their local environment in a very realistic way. Travelers will be able to understand what it is like to visit a city, providing a “sense of place” not possible with conventional 2D maps.

One city that has already taken advantage of the program is Westport, Ireland where they produced a 3D city model to promote their town as a world class tourist destination and business location and to help preserve its heritage.

The Cities in 3D Program launching in Europe extends our efforts to engage with content providers, especially government agencies, to help them make the information they produce more accessible and useful. Take a look at the video below to learn more about the power of 3D or explore some great existing 3D cities here.

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Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

By now, many of you have heard about the new Google Earth API that we announced Wednesday during Google I/O. It’s exciting that you can now enjoy the 3D Google Earth experience in the browser, and you can create your own custom interactive apps on top of it. This new API lets you use JavaScript to programmatically interact with the Earth browser, changing camera views, loading KML or 3D models, or even creating KML objects from scratch.

Here’s your basic “Hello Earth” app:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><head><title>Hello Google Earth!</title><!-- *** Replace the key below below with your own API key, available at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html *** --><script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=abcd"></script><script>google.load("earth", "1");

var ge = null;

function init() { google.earth.createInstance("map3d", initCallback, failureCallback);}

function initCallback(object) { ge = object; ge.getWindow().setVisibility(true);}

function failureCallback(object) { // Gracefully handle failure.}</script></head>

<body onload='init()' id='body'><center> <div> Hello, Earth! </div>

 <div id='map3d_container' style='border: 1px solid silver; height: 600px; width: 800px;'> <div id='map3d' style='height: 100%;'></div> </div></center>

</body></html>

And, if you’re already a Google Maps API developer, adding Google Earth to your mashup is really easy. Just add the following line:

 map.addMapType(G_SATELLITE_3D_MAP);

To view apps written in the Earth API, you will have to download a browser plug-in. Currently, the plug-in is Windows only, and works on Mozilla and Internet Explorer based browsers, including Firefox. We are working to expand the number of browsers, and have announced Mac and Linux plug-ins will be released in August.

Check out the cool sample apps. If you have any questions or come across any problems, post them in our Earth API developer group.

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Our last weeks series of posts on 3D Agent Based Models using 3D Max has been interesting (at least we have found it interesting). It is easy to set up any number of agents to swarm or wander within a set radius but adding behaviours beyond swarming is more difficult.
It seem to be [...]

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Simulating traffic is a science in itself with each car acting as an agent that is aware of its surroundings. It is notoriously difficult to create convincing traffic flow in 3D packages without input from specialist simulations and as such its a good challenge for our recent explorations of using agents in 3D [...]

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The second in what is looking like a series of posts on 3D Agent Based Modelling in cities - in short on placing crowd, pedestrian and transport behavior into 3D models.
Yesterday’s post covered our first steps, developing ‘Ant Like’ behaviors on a surface, our next movie displays a degree of intelligence in our [...]

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LightUp is creating quite a stir in the SketchUp community and for good reason. The plugin allows realtime lighting inside of SketchUp which by the looks of it dramatically improves the look of models.
The two YouTube movies below provide a preview:
The difference in quality is notable and this is one to [...]

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Our Greeble City Tutorial provides a walk through on how to quickly and easily create a cityscape, complete with custom skyscrapers. Creating a city is all well and good but it is the fine details that brings a 3D city to life, the first of these is the road network.
Creating a road network [...]

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When I was a kid, I was a Marvel comic book fanatic, but no superhero held my fascination like Spiderman. I horded Spidey issues. I drew pictures of him. My family has pictures of me posing as Spiderman as I pretended to walk on walls and swing from building to building.

30+ years later, my fantasy has become realized in Google Earth 4.3. Few have noticed this new feature yet, but you can swoop to the top or sides of 3D buildings, then jump from building to building ala my favorite superhero. To do this, right click (CTRL + click on the Mac) on the building and drag the mouse. You can swoop from building to building by doing the same. Learn more in the user guide.

You can also view a 3D building from different perspectives. To do this, click the middle mouse button (Shift + left mouse if your mouse does not have a middle button).

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Google’s new partnership program for local governments, Cities in 3D, announced today, is initially aimed at U.S. local governments (though the rest of world is invited to participate) to encourage the creation and sharing of 3D models of their geographies. While anyone can now upload a model to Google 3D Warehouse, it must meet certain [...]

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Do you have style? Are you a SketchUp Pro enthusiast? Then you’ll want to check out our 2008 SketchUp Sketchy-Edge Style Building Competition. This is a great chance to test out the new Style Builder and try your hand at a modern take on old-fashioned sketching — and maybe win some fun prizes. [...]

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Yesterday i promised a great new 3D feature for developers so here it is. In December a minor rev of the Virtual Earth Map Control v6 was released. For those that aren’t software developers, the VE map control is a JavaScript library providing developers a unified interface for adding traditional mapping as well [...]

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3D plugins, browsers and languages come and go, Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) rode a wave of hype only to suffer as a result of being before its time. Viewpoint, our personal favorite of a few years ago, rode a similar wave attracting a strong community of developers before rather foolishly locking them [...]

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When your covering architectural renderings from the leading design studios creating your own 3D models can be slightly intimidating. It is well worth remembering that free 3D modelling software such as Google SketchUp or Blender - the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems - allows anyone [...]

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