Links: Rumsey, Where 2.0, South Africa tourism

Monday, May 12, 2008 (21:36 UTC)

New Rumsey Historical Maps: 100 historical maps from David Rumsey’s collection have been added to Google Earth as overlays, for a grand total of 120 maps. The collections is now also more manageable — click on icons on the globe to download your overlay of choice. There are some truly fantastic maps in this layer, including some of Egypt — but the color scheme of the popup windows makes the text almost illegible (on a Mac).

Where 2.0 preännouncements: All Points Blog gives us a preview of what companies will be announcing at Where 2.0. EveryScape is really worth watching out for.

South Africa tourist layer: South Africa’s tourist commission releases a polished KML collection of tourist sites, including stadiums for the 2010 World Cup. I suspect this layer will soon find its way into Google Earth’s default Travel and Tourism layer — it’s a lot better than Egypt’s effort.

Using Second Life for Cityscapes: Fresh from his planetarium-building spree in Second Life, Swedish SL programming virtuoso Magnus Zeisig is now setting his sites on using SL to mimic historical cityscapes. A Swedish museum is interested in exhibiting such cityscapes in a virtual world, so Magnus has made an extensive study (PDF) of what is out there in SL right now in terms of cities, appended with some of his thoughts. Not surprisingly, he’s found that computer algorithms for building cityscapes are more realistic-looking than manual builds.