Archive for the ‘Experimental’ Category

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Pen-y-Garn Mountain Panorama for GE

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Following the nice spell of weather thought it an excellent opportunity to capture some images to create another Google Earth PhotoSpot (I still don’t think there is an official name for these).

Pen y Garn Panorama

Download the Google Earth Version (262kb KMZ file).

Used in the making of this: AutoPano*, Paint Shop Pro, DigitalUrban Panorama viewer for GE, (of course) Google Earth, a SpaceNavigator and Winzip 10#.

* (demo version, hence the watermark, first time used but really good, just got to make a usecase to someone to buy it for me ;)

# using Winzip to create the KMZ file seems to manage to squeeze some compression out of the jpg itself :)

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, PhotoSpot | 1 Comment »

Mountain Panorama in Google Earth

Monday, January 15th, 2007

DigitalUrban, has for a while being working on a Panorama Viewer for Google Earth, well to prove that it doesn’t just apply to Urban settings, I have created this panorama of the Top of Snowdon Google Earth File, the highest mountain in Wales (and England).

Really impressive! Just in case you don’t have a SpaceNavigator to really explore, have created a few views, just double click to move around. (idea from Google Earth Blog – except I used folders, so don’t have icons).

To really enjoy the feel of the mountains, I recommend setting your Terrain Exaggeration setting to about 2.0, although having said that the included Snapshot views are designed for when TE is set at 1, as that’s probably the most common.

I should note that I scaled up the model, to make it easier to use, so it does leave a rather large blob on top of the hill! This is also only a rectilinear panorama, rather than spherical, so it will be nice if DigitialUrban can work in support for such images.

geotagged More Links for this location

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, PhotoSpot, SpaceNavigator | 1 Comment »

UK ZIPScribble Map

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

UK ZipScribble MapFollowing inspiration from the US ZIPScribble Map, I have created a UK version. Due to the resolution of the Postcodes in the UK it doesn’t work that well with full postcodes, but using sector postcodes seems to work well, click the thumbnail for a higher resolution version. (yes know some Postcode areas are missing!)

I have split and changed colour between postcode area (the first 1,2 letters), otherwise the sorting is done in alphanumeric order.

(via eagereyes.org blog)

Posted in Experimental, Nearby, online maps | Comments Off

Network Link updates

Friday, December 15th, 2006

Following on from the last post about the amazing 3D SpaceNavigator (PE) from 3dconnexion, it has finally inspired me to blow the dust off the experimental solution to Making a View-Based Refresh efficient when tilted?, that I blogged about a while ago.

So I’ve just implemented this on the Geograph Google Earth ‘Wide Area’ Network Link, and the Nearby NetworkLayers, (imaginative names aye?), which along with GB and Ireland Grid Lines Layers any my most used network links.

This should have no affect when looking ‘straight down’ but when the globe is tilted, hopefully the useful information should be better positioned in the foreground rather than extending into the blurry distance.

Feedback welcome…

Posted in Experimental, Geograph, Google Earth, Nearby, network-link, SpaceNavigator | Comments Off

Blue Marbled Google Earth Globe

Monday, November 20th, 2006

GE Screenshot showing Blue Marble ImagryI really should at least mention the hard work Frank Taylor from gearthblog.com has put into getting Blue Marble Imagry to overlay on your Google Earth Globe. The results are amazing, it seems a definite improvement over the patchwork mosaic you see when viewing large areas, and as a bonus you get realtimeish (3hours) global clouds.

Anyway read more over at GEarthBlog, here.
Or just download directly here Google Earth KML Download.

(it exploits the new Region Functionality in the GE v4 (Beta), however a bug prevents this from working nicely in all but the very latest version, so such users fall over gracefully to a version that works by intereacting with a webserver. )

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, network-link | Comments Off

Placemarks Grouped and Sorted

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

I’ve had a request to be able to sort the output of the KML Grouper, so … well… now you can! Enjoy.

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, Web Services | 1 Comment »

Making a View-Based Refresh efficient when tilted?

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I guess this only is really of interest to Google Earth network link builders… And rather that rewrite again what I wrote on the GEC, will quote the juicy bit and then provide a link (laziness!)

 ” As is probably common I use the BBOX returned during a refresh of a View-Based refresh to return some results to the user.

This works well when the view is directly overhead as there is very little wastage and the bbox represents the region of interest quite well.

However as soon as the view is tilted it becomes less useful as lots of the bbox is wasted in encompassing the distant area toward the horizon. “

I then go on to discuss my potential solution, add a demo and a link to the source, hopeing that somebody else is working or at least thinking of something similar…

View post here

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, network-link | 1 Comment »

Google Earth Version Stats

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

In trying to debug the KML for the Geograph exports, I had to make a decision about weather to move to KML 2.1 (GE4+ only), this set be wondering what versions are actually still in use and is it work still supporting GE3.So to that end produced this page. This aggregates all accesses to the various network links hosted on Nearby.org.uk, which of course is only a small corner of the net, wonder how this compares to Googles stats?

(disclaimer: I have a fondness for arbitrary stats!)

Conclusion: GE3 is still has about 27% market share, but could be dropping rapidly as people rush to try the new beta. (or could just be nobody using GE3 at the moment, to try the new features, but will go back for day-to-day work)

[OT: Oh and regular users might recognize that I finally got round to doing a little bit of personalization of the WordPress theme used around these parts, much nicer IMHO]

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, network-link | 2 Comments »

KML Grouper by State, Country, Continent…

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

Meant to be starting work, so will just duplicate my GEC post for the moment:

Well it looks like it works, so pleased to give you this think:

http://www.nearby.org.uk/group-kml.php

“… Takes a kml file full of placemarks, and organizes them into a folder tree structure, starting by continent and working down though country to state/county if possible…”

feedback is welcome,

In particular thinking of introducing a few more levels of customisation of the grouping, eg only by country, or skip continent etc, but see how it goes…

Huge thanks to geonames.org for the webservices that power this, and to pmaxfield2 for the idea!

P.S. Not every country has state/county breakdown, notably the UK, this is something that geonames is working to rectify, but even the US gov couldn’t get the data!

Posted in Experimental, geonames, Google Earth, Nearby | Comments Off

…updates, updates, updates …

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

After a comparatively quiet period, have finally begun some development work again on these sites, so far: The Nearby API now has a SOAP interface. And two new features for Google Earth: IARU Locator Echo and Worldwide MGRS Grid-lines Layer.
Oh and deformedweb.co.uk is now hosted on the same dedicated server as this site, should mean can do more there….

Posted in API, Experimental, Google Earth, Nearby, network-link, Web Services | Comments Off

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