Google, the company, has updated the 3D maps of New York City, the city, in Google Earth. So now when you’re cruising, virtually, around the city that never sleeps you’ll be able to view higher res buildings.

No, it’s not the biggest news of the day, but it could be helpful when trying to whittle away the hours while at the office or in class. And really, that’s all we’re trying to accomplish here.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai have once again put Google Earth in an unfavorable light. The one (“baby-faced”) terrorist that police caught has said that the terrorists used Google Earth the help plan the attacks. (That they also used everyday cellphones, GPS and other technologies appears to be lost on the ban happy Indian officials.) In order to prevent future attacks, so the line of thinking goes, officials there want at the very least to force Google to blur our sensitive sites from the software, if not ban it outright.

Let’s also keep in mind that India plans to launch its own version of Google Earth, so to speak.

While it seems an overreaction to me to want to ban what amounts to an electronic map—are we looking to ban regular, paper maps now?—in no way was I affected by the attacks, at least not directly, so it’s hard for me to qualify India’s reaction. It does seem that attacking (banning) tools instead of the idea and forces behind those tools is folly.

Google launched its own satellite, the GeoEye1, last month and this here is its first photo. It’s a shot of Kutzton University in Pennsylvania.

The GeoEye1 satellite will serve a number of clients, including the U.S. government (and Google itself). Naturally, the government will be able to access higher resolution images than you and I. That said, the new images that you and I will have access to on Google Maps and Google Earth will be of “much higher quality” than what we’re used to.

What’s Google’s stock at right now? I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of lavish spending slows down in the next few months.

The residents of Chelyabinsk thought it would be a great idea to form a human smiley face just in time for a Google imagery satellite. It’s just too bad the smile has buckteeth.

The National Snow and Ice Center, a division of Proctor & Gamble, has uploaded Google Earth-compatible KML files that make it plain as day to see polar ice cap melting over the past several years. If you don’t have Google Earth installed, there’s a Quicktime movie that gives you the gist of what’s going on. We’re all doomed, essentially. Or something.

I don’t know, it’s something to mess around with for a few minutes while we all wait for The Big Announcement™.

via TG Daily

Some no-good kids in the UK have been harnessing the power of Google Earth to find houses with nice pools. Once a suitable house has been found, the kids use Facebook to send out some sort of “Crash This Pool” app or whatever the hell it is that you kids do on Facebook these days. Everyone shows up at the pool, beer and cigarettes in tow, and starts doing “the bump” or whatever the hell it is that you kids do at pool parties these days. Sounds fun, except for the part about how the pool and the house it’s attached to don’t belong to the kids. According to the Register…

“Owners of several plush poolside properties have already returned home to find teenagers taking a dip in their man-made lakes or their spoor: beer cans, dog-ends and vomit floating atop their once crystal-clear pools.”

If I had a pool and some kids showed up in the middle of the night. I’d sneak out into the yard and pretend I was one of them, drinking all their beer and smoking all their cigs. At the end of the night, I’d be like "Hey! Let’s rake this guy’s leaves, clean up after ourselves, and leave him some money! He’s probably pretty cool!"

Ah, sweet revenge.

The Vee Balance Board, finally put to good use. A couple of German researchers hacked the Wii Fit input device to work with Google Earth and other oddball applications. This here video explains the lot of it, complete with early 1990s Hackers-sounding, proto-trance background music.

via Nowhere Else

Don’t think this won’t/can’t happen. Google is like a batshit crazy ex-girlfriend. It will find a way and you’ll wake up one morning with IT standing over you all wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth.

Google Earth is pretty cool as it is, letting users traverse the globe and see all sorts of landmarks and the like. What would make it better, though, would be to hear the sounds of the area you’re looking at. One company, Wild Sanctuary, has more than 3,500 hours of ambient sounds from all over God’s Green Earth. Collecting all those sound clips took 40 years and now the company is looking to sell to Google. The thinking is that users want to hear the sounds of Parisian streets or New York cabbies cursing at pedestrians in Farsi. Give Google Earth the coordinates and listen in on the wonderful sounds of life. Hey, I’ve heard worse ideas. Plus it gives you the chance to here places you’d have no intention of ever visiting. Anfield, anyone? (Actually, I have no idea if they’ve captured the sound of The Kop on European nights, but that I’d be willing to pay for.)

The software that powers that sound layer will be presented at the Web 2.0 conference later in the month. Do it, Google, and make it free to end-users.

Sounds bring Google Earth to life [BBC News]

GPS software firm Trimble Outdoors gets a gold star for being the first to release an outdoor enthusiast multimedia layer for Google Earth. Users download the software to their cellphones and other GPS-capable devices. It then piggybacks on top of Google Earth, providing video clips and the like for featured areas.

Want to check out your local hiking trail before you even step outside? (Well, maybe not your local trails, but the big guys.) Just fire up Google Earth with Trimble Outdoors’ software loaded in and you’ll be able to see the trail and its many hazards right away. Better yet, you can export the data to compatible cellphones so you can see all the hazards and so forth while actually on the ol’ trail.

Look, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’ve never spent a minute of my life in the great outdoors, but I certainly can appreciate checking out faraway, um, outdoor locales, from the comfort of Google Earth. Can’t get itchy bug bites that way, now can you?

Trimble Outdoors in Google Earth [Trimble Outdoors]

This week, Pentax received a patent on a 3-D imaging system with distance controls while two individual inventors patented a means for viewing 3-D digital images on the Internet. The art of Stereoscopy has been around for a century, but what’s captivating is where this space can go with the explosion in the digital realm.
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