nearby.org.uk blog » API

Stereoscopic (3D) Earth

Barry — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:46:58 +0000

Alerted by ogleearth to an interesting mashup with the new Google Earth Plugin, that promises Stereo viewing of earth I couldnt wait to get home to try on my windows machine….

However try as a I might I could not cross my eyes enough to see it in all its glory. So I copied* the code and made the size of of the globes configurable (well I first tried just changing the hardcoded value), and the result is:

stereo-earth.php?s=200

I found I can get it to work on 200pixels, any bigger and just couldnt manage it, but try it yourself (change the numbers in the url).

Another tip: press F11 to remove distracting screen clutter.

* The original Google demo is under the Apache licence, so assume the Stereoscopic version is too, so this one is also, although the PHP is rather boring.

Google Earth – the API

Barry — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:11:13 +0000

I’ve been following the blogosphere re the recent introduction of the Google Earth API. Which is a slightly lightweight version of Google Earth packaged in a browser, but with a quite rich Javascript/KML hybrid scripting interface.

There has (IMHO) been some misconceptions about exactly what this is, the hype (and I partly fell into the same trap) seems to surround its bringing Google Earth (aka 3D) to the browser – which it certainly does, but as Ed Parsons notes:
“in that context it should become clear that the big announcement of the Google Earth plug-in, is more about adding a API to earth, than bringing 3D functionality to the browser.”
its not the biggest thing – its that it opens Google Earth to scripting!

And being browser based brings reasonably familiar, and cross platform, Javascript to the table, effectively obsoleting the unsupported COM API (and ActionScript?).

As many blogs note 3D in the browser is not that new, LiveMaps (or what ever it called now. virtual earth?) has had it for a while, not to mention WorldWind (java), and the myriad of other 3D globes.

(however the one area this is good on the web, is it allows much larger datasets to be displayed and intereacted with – in already existing Google Maps API mashups – with little work)

Google Earth in the Browser

Barry — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:07:29 +0000

Google has just announced a new Google Earth API – which allows embedding and fully functional Google Earth in just about any webpage. Even is easily intergratable with Google Maps API mashups – with very little extra code. (takes a number of seconds for that news to sink in!)

Be sure to checkout the samples, (particularly the milktruck demo!), I’ve also started trying it out with a few demos of my own…

…Windows only btw…

Expect A LOT MORE from this very flexible looking API – the JS interface can quickly interact with objects (API is based around KML) and gets pretty good control of interface options.

Update: mentioned on gearthblog.com which is a good introduction about what this is and what its not!

Update2: and to show it can basically be added to a ‘real world’ Gmaps mashup, in a few lines of code, see here