OrbVista takes NASA’s public domain imagery and presents it in a semantically richer environment, with a view of the area in Google Maps and with a link to Google Earth. “All” that is left to do now is to automatically generate a KML overlay for the imagery:-) Great stuff. (Via Dan Karran’s Del.icio.us links)
I was AFB (absent from blog) as the Jim Gray disappearance story turned into a huge distributed effort to find him. While things are looking grim for Jim Gray, I hope the distributed search & rescue effort sets a precedent, and that this innovation gets to save many lives in the future.
DestinSharks’s Virgil Zetterlind reviews the Google Earth Voyager, a PC application that caches the high resolution imagery of a specific region so that you can later use Google Earth to navigate through it without an internet connection, using a GPS device. Virgil’s verdict: It works as advertised. (Use caution when installing unverified software.)
Virtually every online news site has now reported that Google has agreed to “blur” sites in India, and they are all wrong. What do you think the chances of getting a correction are? I’m not holding my breath.
In case you were wondering how difficult it is to overlay a map on top of a Virtual Earth, the answer is: Not difficult at all. Here is a five-minute video tutorial of Mapcruncher to prove it, using a map of destroyed villages in Darfur. The result is more accurate than putting an overlay in Google Earth, though it isn’t visible on my Mac. (Via Virtual Earth blog)
Another default layer for Google Earth: Sunrises, courtesy of the Discovery Channel. It’s very pretty, but technically this is nothing new. What I’d like to see is not a KML file containing placemarks that link to videos, but the pop-up windows themselves being able to play videos. Or how about the ability to overlay a video on Google Earth?
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.