Archive for October, 2007

Blue Marble NG – Google Earth (Rendered) SuperOverlays

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Yes I know, its another way to view Blue Marble Next Generation imagery in Google Earth, but here Jonathan van Tuijl has taken the time to pre-process the full resolution 500m/pixel imagery into static files, meaning that hopefully the loading should be smother (at least when accessed from this side of the Atlantic!) and more refined as a its not relying on a server to dynamically generate the KML and images (even if it then caches it), as done here. We also hope to make available the full range of Blue Marble layers.

View the Blue Marble NG Overlays Homepage and download the Link

… doesn’t do any of the fancy fading out like the version here, which is designed to be left running :)

See the post in the KML group that started this little adventure, which I believe started as an exercise for Jonathan to find a way to slice up really large images, and generate a Google Earth SuperOverlay from that; as none of the ‘packages’ seemed to be able to manage it (I’ve tried it too!). So I joined in offering hosting – as think its a neat exercise in hosting really large datasets (7.4GB at last count) – now I have a powerful server. (famous last words…)

What is this?

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

Click for zoomable version

Click image for a Flash based Zoomable Version…

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More Maps.Live.com inc KML2RSS

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

The people at Live.com (Microsoft!) have been making some huge improvements to their map system of late, adding lots of data in both 2D and 3D. maps.live.com has long been good in the UK as it uses imagery from getmapping which is at least 2m resolution, but 25cm in many places. It’s now been backed up by lots of Birds Eye imagry which are static photos taken at an angle, which is great for visualising cities. How these are available in the 3D view (which is currently downloading so havent tried it…) ! Also now supported is visualling KML, GPX and GeoRSS files.
Anyway that was kinda rambley, the point of this post was to highlight small feature I found by accident and not sure it been highlighted on other blogs, namly you can subscribe to a RSS feed for many collections, including a KML or GPX file directly, effectively giving a KML to (Geo)RSS converter!

Example: Recent Geographs KML file as GeoRSS

(looks like we can input any KML/KMZ url in there!)

Buffalo, New York – PhotoSpot

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

While on a recent trip to the States, took this photo, stiched together from many shots with AutoPan Pro. Traditionally I have provided a GoogleEarth model using DigitalUrban’s panorama object, however this time will simply link to the placemark as provided by Gigapan.org:

View in Google Earth (but requires 4.2+ to take advantage of the PhotoOverlay – in full resolution glory!)

View in a Web Browser (using a flash viewer)

Thanks to Gigapan for providing this really super (and quite fast!) hosting for these high resolution images…

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