Introducing Google World Wonders

World Wonders is a new project from Google that allows you to take a virtual trip around 132 of the World's most famous historical and cultural sites. The sites includes historically important locations, such as Stonehenge and Pompeii and also natural wonders, such as the sandy dunes of Australia’s Shark Bay and the rock domes of Yosemite National Park.

Google World Wonders uses Google Maps, Google Street View and Google Earth 3d models to explore these 132 historical locations. Each location also includes YouTube videos and photographs from Getty Images. Information about each location is also provided by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

Google World Wonders also includes a great Education section with downloadable resources for history and geography students and guides for primary and secondary school teachers.

Via: Google: Official Blog

Fore - Lookout It's the Ultimate Golf Guide

The Golf Guide is a Google Map showing the location of thousands of golf courses throughout the world.

Many of the golf courses displayed on the map include Google Earth tours. The green map markers show which courses have the Google Earth tours available. When you click on a green marker an information window will open displaying the course with the Google Earth browser plugin.

The Google Earth tours take you on a 3d flyover of the course. You can interrupt the tour at any time and use the links to fly to a particular hole. The tour also informs the user of the par and length of each hole.

Duke University Unveils a 3D Campus Map

A good university campus map needs to be able to help visitors and students quickly find the building or room that they are looking for.

If the buildings and campus are as beautiful as Duke University then it might also be worth pushing the boat out and creating a full 3D map. The Duke University Campus Map not only lets you view categories of location (for example libraries, residence halls, dining etc) it also includes 3D models of the whole campus.

Concept3D worked with Duke University to create the 3D models, which can be viewed by selecting 'Earth 3D' on the map. This will switch the 2D Google Map to the Google Earth browser plugin.

The Google Earth Clock

First there was Rhett Dashwood - Google Maps Typography, in which Rhett Dashwood scoured Google Maps to find all the letters of the alphabet in geographical features found in satellite view.

Then came the Google Maps Typewriter, an application that lets you type in words and see them represented with, yes you guessed it, letters of the alphabet found on Google Maps.

Now we have the Google Earth Clock! Yes, it's a digital clock assembled from satellite views of Earth. The Google Earth clock uses the Google Earth browser plug-in to show the current time. Just load up the page and watch as the clock loads different Google Earth views so that it always shows the current time.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

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Google Earth Flight Simulator

GE Flight Simulator (0.4)

GE Flight Simulator is a very realistic flight simulation game that uses the Google Earth plugin.

Using the simulation you can fly anywhere in the world. The simulation uses Google Maps to display and help you navigate to over 30,000 airports around the world. To view the map in flight just click the "show map" button in the option bar.

If you click on any of the displayed airports you can choose to fly from or fly to the selected airport. In "Aeronautical" mode, the map also shows a layer of airspace areas. This overlay has been generated using DAFIF data.

You can also view the map of the 30,000 airports on its own here.

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View the Lunar Eclipse with Google Maps

HeyWhatsThat Eclipse Simulator
Tonight's partial lunar eclipse is best seen from the Pacific in the middle of the night or in the western U.S. just before dawn. The upcoming July 11th total solar eclipse will be seen to best advantage in the South Pacific.

I only know this because of HeyWhatsThat's latest Eclipse Simulator. Here's a video of the simulator in action showing the July 11th solar eclipse,



The simulation uses two instances of the Google Earth plug-in, one showing the Earth and the other the sky. You set your location by clicking on the Earth, set the time by clicking on the green timeline, and start an animation by clicking on the timeline's arrow. Use the drop-down menu on the bottom right to view other eclipses.

(Note that the timeline shows your computer's local time, not the time at the chosen viewer location.)

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Real-Time Ships in the Gulf of Mexico

Sea-Seek.com

Sae-seek.com, the social sharing site for sailors and boat lovers, has added live real-time ship tracking to their Google Earth browser sailing simulations.

With the sea-seek.com Google Earth browser applications it is possible to sail, fly a helicopter or pilot a submarine at many different locations around the world. The application includes models of other ships plotted at their current real-time positions.

At the moment if you sail around the position of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico you can view a lot of ships that are presumably involved in efforts to cap the well.

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Street View Tour of Copenhagen

Kongens Nytorv - København

Using the new Street View imagery for Copenhagen microformats.dk has created a really cool tour of Copenhagen. The mashup synchronises the Google Earth browser plugin with Street View to show you 360 degree panoramas in both Street View and Google Earth.

The tour works particularly well because of the extensive 3D buildings available in Google Earth for Copenhagen. To view a location just click on the Google Map. The tour then zooms in on that location in the Google Earth plugin and automatically rotates around the view. A Street View embed also rotates giving you the same view but as seen from the ground.

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The Burj Dubai on Google Maps

Burj, Dubai

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa (formerly known as the Burj Dubai) is due to be opened today. The Burj Dubai is 828m (2,684 ft) tall.

Unfortunately Google Maps' satellite view only shows what the location looked like before the building of the Burj began. But you needn't worry as this Google Earth plugin application allows you to view the Burj Khalifa in glorious 3D.

Viewing the skyscraper in Google Earth allows you to compare the Burj to other nearby buildings and really helps to impress upon you the amazing size of this building.

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Terraforming with Google Maps

Guiness Bring it to Life

Guiness have released a new Google Earth browser plugin game that requires players to terraform planets.

The object of the game is to create 'mountainous', 'plains' and 'vegetation' regions on a planet and then search for water droplets in your terraformed regions. When you have collected enough water a pint of Guiness is created on your planet. If you find the pint of Guiness you have the chance of winning a crate of Guiness or even a lifetime's supply.

You can invite your friends to your created planet via Facebook Connect and searching together you have a higher chance to win that life time supply of stout.


If you like this you might also like Monopoly City Streets.

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Virtual Helicopter Ride Over Mont Blanc

Virtual Tours of Chamonix & Mont Blanc
Have you ever fancied taking a helicopter ride over Chamonix and Mont Blanc? If so you will love these virtual helicopter rides created with the Google Earth browser plugin.



To start the tour just press 'run'. Once your helicopter is in flight you can then change the view by using the camera buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen. You can also check the progress of your tour using the embedded Google Map in the bottom right corner.

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Satellite Tracking in Street View

ToriSat
ToriSat is an amazing satellite tracking website that allows anyone to track satellites on Google Maps, in the Google Earth Browser plug-in and even in Google Street View. The Google Map view shows the path of the satellite around the Earth and the Google Earth option allows you to view the path of the satellite as if you were looking down from space.

What really impresses me, however, is the Street View option that allows the user to view the satellite superimposed on top of Google's Street View imagery. This is really useful as it shows the elevation of the satellite as it passes overhead. Oh, and you can see all three views at the same time.

You can see the tracking in action in the video below,



The default satellite is the International Space Station but you can select other satellites to track, including the Hubble telescope. You can also change the location of the observation point by clicking the cross at the top of the Street View and dragging the map marker to your location.

ToriSat also comes with a Twitter feed that will Tweet you when the ISS is approaching your location (the site will suggest the Twitter feed to follow from your saved location). There is even an option to save the ISS approaching schedules to your Google Calender.

I'm simply in awe of the developers of ToriSat. Check out some of the other amazing stuff they are involved in (including the Street View SpaceBike) here.

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The Best Game in the Universe

La Aventura Del Universo

L'Agrupación Astronómica de Madrid, CosmoCaixa Madrid and the Planetario de Madrid have jointly released an astronomy game using Google Sky. The game has been released as a Google Gadget and uses the Google Earth browser plug-in.

The game itself is in the form of a quiz. Each question is placed in a different part of the universe and after you answer a question you fly through the stars to the next part of the quiz. The questions include YouTube videos and models of the planets (observe Jupiter in the screenshot above).

The game is in Spanish but, if you are interested in astronomy, I think you will enjoy this even if you don't understand the language.

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Map of NASA Moon Rocket

NASA Moon Rocket Crash Site

Here is a Google Earth browser plugin map of today's NASA experiment of firing a segment of rocket into the Moon. The target for the rocket was the Cabeus Crater. The crater was chosen because the lighting conditions at the time would be ideal to see the resulting ejected dirt and rock.

The map includes an embedded YouTube video from Associated Press showing footage of the mission. To view the map and video you will need to have installed the Google Earth plugin on your computer.

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CIA World Factbook on Google Maps

kmlfactbook.org

The kmlfactbook.org site can create impressive presentations from global data-sets. The site allows you to create Google Earth kml files from your own custom data and view the results in Google Maps, via the Google Earth plug-in or download the kml and view it in Google Earth.

As well as allowing anyone to create presentations built with their own data the site has a wealth of data to view from the World Resources Institute EarthTrends and from the CIA Factbook.

The left part of the screen is used to list and select the submitted data-sets. Once a data-set is selected the data is loaded onto a Google Map. You can also choose to view the data in the Google Earth plug-in or opt to download the kml.

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Lunar Landing Game

Apollo 11 Moon Lander
Paul van Dinther, author of the excellent Ships games has turned his attention to the new Moon in Google Earth and produced an excellent Lunar Landing game.

This game, for the Google Earth Browser plugin, involves having to land the Apollo 11 Eagle lander, whilst controlling your fuel and rate of speed. The Google Earth Blog created this video of a successful landing,



One of the big problems with games for the Google Earth plugin, is the lack of automatic collision detection. Therefore in driving games the cars are able to drive straight through buildings. One thing Google Earth does have though is terrain and Paul has used this to enable collision detection for his Lunar Lander.

Definitely the best Google Earth plugin game yet.

Via: Google Earth Blog

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The Apollo 11 Google Earth Tour

The Google Geo Developers Blog is featuring a Google Earth plugin version of the amazing Apollo 11 tour, created by Sean Askay for the launch of Google Moon on Monday. To view the tour you will need to have installed the Google Earth plugin on your computer (or you could watch the video of it below).



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Driving on the Moon

The Google Moon Buggy

Wow! Google have released a Google Earth plugin game that lets you drive a Lunar Rover on the moon.

The game allows you to drive around the various Apollo moon landing sites. The Apollo 11 site is a good place to start because it also contains a model of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module.

Via: Google Geo Developers Blog: Moon in the Google Earth Plugin!

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Space 1999 on Google Moon

Space 1999, Moonbase Alpha
Earlier today the Google Earth Blog reported about Gerardo Paz's amazing 3D model of Moon Base Alpha from the Sci-Fi television series Space 1999. You can view the model and a tour created by Gerardo by viewing this kml in Google Earth.

Søren Johannessen has now created a web page where you can view the tour in the Google Earth plugin. Here's a little screencast:



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Google Moon

Today's big news from Google is that the moon has been added to Google Earth. For news of the launch you should check out the Google Earth Blog. Frank Taylor is at the launch event and I'm sure he will be posting about all the features of this latest addition to Google Earth.

You can also check out the Google Earth Blog's Twitter feed, which Frank is using to comment live on the launch in Washington.

Google Moon Landings

Google Moon has also been added to the Google Earth plugin, which means it is possible to view Google Moon in your browser. I've created a quick example of the Apollo Moon landings sites using the plugin. The example includes YouTube videos of the moon landings.

One of the great features of Google Earth and the Google Earth browser plugin is the ability to add tours. Here is a very brief tour of the Apollo 15 Landing Site. The tour is very short and I haven't added any narration or a soundtrack. However, it does show some of the possibilities of creating tours with the new Google Moon option.


The Google Lat Long Blog have now also posted about the launch: Google LatLong: Fly yourself to the moon

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