What if someone were to create a map that showed every street in the country and nothing else? Fathom Information Design did just that, and the results are amazing!

It feels kind of like the city lights of Earth that we recently wrote about, as you can clearly see cities form without any kind of borders or other overlays in there.

What's even more remarkable about the "All Streets" map is how clearly the mountain ranges are defined. Simply by drawing in the roads, you can see them without any difficulty. A great example is the Appalachian Mountains, seen here:

You can view and/or purchase the map over on the Fathom website.

(via +Adrienne St. Aubin)

To celebrate the three year anniversary of the release of the 3D Ocean in Google Earth, they've just released a major update to their bathymetry (underwater terrain) and it looks great!

Similar to their recent update "Pretty Earth" update, this one does quite a lot to help clean up stray artifacts and images visible in the ocean. A great example of that is Guam, seen here alongside the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the world:

Another noteworthy change is that "Atlantis" is now gone. A few years ago some people thought they had found the lost city of Atlantis, but it turned out to simply be sonar tracks from a ship. While that was a reasonable and accurate explanation, the sonar tracks were still pretty ugly on the surface of the ocean. They're now cleaned up as part of this update and the area looks as clear as it should:

To see more of what's changed, Google has created this short video to give you a tour:

Combined with the new patchless imagery, the earth is suddenly looking remarkably better all the way around. For more, check out this entry in the Google Lat Long Blog.

First released in 2007, the "Earth at Night" layer remains a very unique way to view the earth. Captured on the "dark side" of the planet, depending on the time of day, the images are a striking visual of the more urbanized areas of the planet.

However, the images were not easy to capture. For years, astronauts would try to capture the bright lights and only have blurry photographs to show for it, as the earth travels beneath them at 4.4 miles/second.

In 2003, Don Pettit developed an innovative system for capturing these images and he went on to capture over 2,500 photos, with thousands more captured in subsequent missions. You can read more about Don and his technique in this article at Air & Space Magazine.

To see the lights for yourself, simply click on the [Layers] in Google Earth, open [NASA], then [Earth City Lights] and click the button in there.. For the best results, disable your other layers and places to get a nice clean view of the earth. You should likely disable the atmosphere as well (under [View] --> [Atmosphere]), but I kind of like the glow it gives. It's a neat effect.

A big thanks to Don for pioneering this amazing technique, and hopefully as time goes on this imagery will become even higher-quality and more striking.

We first showed you the Monster Milktruck API demo nearly four years ago, but thanks to a reminder from the Google Earth page on Google+, I went back and played it a bit more. What a fun little game!

If you're not familiar with it, it's difficult to call it a "game" because it's actually just a tech demo; there is no objective, no scoring, and no way to lose a life. That said, it's remarkably fun to drive around various places in the world with just a few presses of your keypad. As long as you have the Google Earth Plug-in installed (which you most likely do), you can play the game here.

If you enjoy driving around in the milktruck, you'll really enjoy Paul van Dinther's Drive the A-Team van" game from a few years ago. It's the same basic idea, but with 3D trees, collision detection on the buildings, and missions to accomplish.

This is one of the great things about Google Earth; old games/files will automatically improve over time as better imagery and new 3D buildings are released!

We took our daughters (ages 5 and 8) on their first geocaching adventure this weekend and it was great! We used the very popular Geocaching.com website, which had quite a few Google Earth tools to make our adventure easier to plan.

In particular, they have a Geocache Google Earth Viewer that you can download and use. It's essentially a network link that shows all of their geocache locations in Google Earth -- over 1.6 million of them!

It was quite handy to fly around in Google Earth, find local caches, then click to see if they were worth checking out. We eventually stumbled upon a local "challenge" (10 locations to find, including this one) and had a good time.

While the icons are clickable, I would like to see them have a bit more info. In particular, the "last found" date would be helpful, so you could quickly see if a cache was likely to still be in place.

They also integrate Google Earth by allowing you to create "routes" that are generated by uploading KML files.

For all of you geocachers out there, what is your favorite way to search for new caches to find?

We talk about Google SketchUp quite often on here, and for good reason. It's an amazing piece of free software that allows you to create 3D models for use in Google Earth and other places.

We've shown you a few SketchUp-related books in the past (such as "SketchUp for Dummies"), but Robin de Jongh of sketchupuser.co.uk has written a book that might be of great interest to some of you: "Google SketchUp for Game Design".

The book covers some SketchUp basics, such as texture creation and modeling, but then gets into some cool game-specific sections such as:

• Sketching out the level.
• Importing to a professional game application (Unity 3D).
• Setting up your character controller.
• "Fencing" areas of your creation.
• Creating a realistic car with SketchUp.
• Exporting your game for others to play.

The book is full of screenshots and step-by-step tutorials to help make things as clear as possible. If you've ever had an interest in developing 3D games, this book would be a great way to get started.

You can pick up a copy of "Google SketchUp for Game Design" from Packt Publishing or on Amazon (including a version for Kindle).

Also, as always, if you build a noteworthy 3D model in Google Earth using SketchUp, please let us know about it so we can check it out for ourselves and perhaps feature it on the blog.

Last week we showed you the fresh satellite imagery and tour of the wreck of the Costa Concordia. It was a great file that helped to show what happened, but now Peter Olsen (who just days ago unveiled the excellent Terra Nova models) has built an incredible 3D tour of the wreck, with the entire journey animated!

The speed has been increased to save time, so you don't have to wait 2-1/2 hours for it to finish, but it's otherwise as accurate as possible. To see it for yourself, simply visit the Costa Concordia Disaster Animation page in the Google 3D Warehouse and choose the "View in Google Earth" link.

If you're not familiar with using Tour files in Google Earth, simply click the "Double-click me!" text on the left to get it started, then click the play button at the bottom to step through the introductory slides, as seen here:

Fully animated tours like this are a great way to recreate events, and Peter is one of the best around at creating them. A similar example you might want to check out is his recreation of the 1977 Tenerife Airport disaster from a few years ago. Great job, Peter!

Google not only released all new more beautiful imagery of the Earth today, but they also released a whole new version of Google Earth - version 6.2. You can download it here. The biggest news is the integration with Google+:

Here is a quick list of the new features:

• Integration with Google+ - you can now sign into your Google+ account and you can Share your current view with Google+. This feature could have meant that your "My Places" content would be shared on different machines, but apparently they have not implemented that capability yet.
• New Search Interface - Google has made substantial changes to the way searching is done in Google Earth. The results look more like Google Maps. You can also now get walking and biking directions just like in Google Maps. Search results also happen dynamically. They have put a lot of effort to updating the search capabilities in Google Earth to bring it in line with Google Maps. The font is much bigger - actually, it seems a bit too big. You may need to increase the width of your sidebar to be able to read the results better. See screenshot below.
• New graphic rendering - Google has made changes including turning on anisotropic filtering by default.
• New Imagery in Google Earth Mobile version - The new version of the imagery of the Earth also appears in the mobile version of Google Earth.
• Improvements to Network Links - better handling of parallel loading of network links.

We will keep adding to this list as we find significant new features. More details from Google are available in the release notes.

Here is a screenshot of the new search results:

Google has just this morning released a new, prettier, version of the Earth for Google Earth. The short version is that it now looks much more Earth-like and less like a bunch of satellite and aerial photos patched onto a sphere. And, it really does look MUCH better!

Since Google Earth was first released in 2005, Google has made thousands of changes to their imagery. Changes to how the imagery looks (colors, contrast, lighting) when combined so it has a more pleasant look from space. One of the most frequent comments about Google Earth is "why are these ugly patches of rectangular images on the Earth?". Well, Google has released today a new attempt to address the problem.

Some of the changes Google has attempted to its imagery were not successful. For example when they attempted to cut images that showed away from the coastlines which removed a lot of valuable information. Google later provided access to that valuable imagery in in the historical imagery layer. Or the time they tried changing the colors in a detrimental way, which they quickly removed a few days later.

Today, Google has finally combined many different attempts, and suggestions from the Google Earth user community, and implemented a major change to the imagery that greatly improves the look of Google Earth. The most obvious change is that the "patchwork" of random-looking rectangles of imagery from different sources is no longer obvious. But, Google's new imagery is much more dramatic than is obvious. They have altered nearly all the imagery of the Earth and made major improvements to the contrast, lighting, and consistency of the imagery at all levels. And, they have used features inherent to Google Earth's abilities to transition at different zoom levels to smoothly move between imagery that is very pleasing to the eye.

These changes are subtle if you don't have access to the way things looked before.
Here are some comparison shots showing the dramatic change before and after in just a few places:

Before/After USA

Before/After Africa

Before/After China

As you can see, the improvement is dramatic when you compare the old to the new. But, once most people start using this, they'll probably quickly forget how it used to be and just accept the new look. However, we should really appreciate the huge effort Google has made to pretty up the Earth, and thank them for a job well done!

When Google Earth 6.0 was released, it completely changed the way that Street View worked. However, Google kept the older layer active for previous versions of Google Earth so that those users could continue to use Street View. Not anymore.

Sometime in the past few weeks, Google has turned off that old layer. If you're wanting to use Street View in Google Earth, you're now required to be using version 6.0 or higher.

Here's a quick look at how to use Street View in Google Earth 6:

In addition to that video, I've built a few other Google Earth tutorials to help explain some features, including how to use historical imagery, elevation profiles and a few more.

Beyond that, Google has just released Street View imagery in South Korea, primarily in Seoul and Busan. As you can see from the screen shot below, the imagery in those is very sharp.

You can read more about the new South Korean Street View imagery on the Google Lat Long Blog.

If you still need to upgrade to Google Earth 6 to get the new Street View features, you can always download it (for free!) from earth.google.com.

100 years ago saw two very ill-fated attempts to explore Antarctica; Robert Scott's 1912 expedition to the South Pole and Sir Douglas Mawson's 1912 Eastern Expedition.

In honor of those events, Peter Olsen has built a handful of 3D models in Antarctica and they look amazing. You may remember Peter from his excellent models of the MLK National Memorial and Stone Mountain, among many others.

Here is a look at Robert Scott's hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island in Antarctica:

Peter has a a total of nine models available in his 3D Warehouse collection, with more on the way.

To learn more about these expeditions, you can check out this Wikipedia entry about Robert's Scotts "Terra Nova" Expedition or visit MawsonsHuts.aq for the story of Sir Douglas Mawson and his crew.

Great work, Peter!

We first told you about Breadcrumbs in late 2010. They're a GPS track management site that offers a lot of great features through a nice interface. They've just gone through a major redesign and are now an even more compelling option to consider using.

In addition to the redesign, there are a handful of other great things that Breadcrumbs has done since we last mentioned them:

50,000 Tracks: Over 50,000 tracks are now in their database, including quite a few from GEB readers.

Integration with mobile apps: Breadcrumbs now can integrate with mobile apps on Garmin devices, Android, iPhone, Nokia and others.

WordPress plugin: They now have an official WordPress plugin to easily embed your tracks onto your WordPress-powered site.

Other new features: The redesign includes a handful of other features that you can read about on their blog.

All in all, it's quite a nice update. If you gather GPS tracks from anything (exercise, travel, etc), what product do you prefer to use to store and view them?

We all know that Google Earth is great for visualizing an amazing array of information. However, sometimes it won't support a need that you have and a creative solution must be found. Such is the case today with Skycomp and their "traffic flow visualization" tool. It's no surprise to us that Paul van Dinther from PlanetInAction.com is the guy that made it happen -- he's built some amazing applications over the years, including the focus of yesterday's post on the cruise ship Costa Concordia. His solution to help Skycomp is quite innovative.

There are two main components that come together to make this happen.

First you have Skycomp, who have found a cost effective way to collect aerial footage of the same location over a sustained period. This involves maintaining an accurate position of the helicopter and complex image alignment and correction.

Secondly you have the Google Earth component. The imagery produced by Skycomp typically is taken at a 1 or 2 second interval and turned into a video. Unfortunately, Google Earth is not equipped to render video on the ground. So instead, Paul uses a sequence of ground overlays and individually turns them on and off using javascript and the Google Earth API. The application is designed to play back several minutes of footage of a busy intersection so a traffic flow analysis can be done. In order to produce a smooth looking playback the application actually fades the next image on top of the previous image. The amount of cross-fade can be reduced for more detailed frame by frame analysis. It's quite an impressive result.

You can try it for yourself by visiting www.planetinaction.com/skycomp/.

If you'd prefer, here's a video that shows off how the system works:

For more info, check out the latest edition of the Skycomp newsletter.

The next stage of the application will introduce the capability to export the animation as a KMZ file for playback on Google Earth Desktop using the tour mechanism, which would be quite impressive and very useful for people in this field.

By now you've likely heard all about the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner crashed off the Tuscan coast last Friday, killing at least 11 passengers.

DigitalGlobe has since captured aerial imagery of the site of the wreck, which can be found in their gallery or viewed below.

I've added that image to Google Earth as an image overlay, which you can view by downloading this KML file.

Another great way to view the ship is thanks to Paul van Dinther from PlanetInAction.com. A few years ago we showed you the amazing collection of cruise ships that Paul created for CleanCruising.com.au. One of the ships that Paul created for that project happened to be the Costa Concordia.

Since he had a 3D model of the ship and the skills to make some great tours, Paul put together this short video showing a bit about what happened.

Thanks to the generosity of the folks at CleanCruising.com.au, they've allowed Paul and PlanetInAction.com to release a full KMZ file of the stricken ship, which you can download in this KMZ file. Paul's model is amazingly accurate, and he includes various notes in the file to show the path of the ship.

Great work, Paul!

As you may have noticed over the years, we're big fans of Google Android. Google Earth is phenomenal on recent devices (3D buildings on the tablets and on the Galaxy Nexus). Each release of Android is given the name of a tasty treat -- Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. As each version is released, Google erects a statue in front of their headquarters of the most recent treat.

GEB reader 'Arek' felt that those statues deserved to be shown in Google Earth, so he modeled all of them and they've just been accepted into the main [3D Buildings] layer in Google Earth. They look great!

To see them for yourself, simply fly over there by using this KML file. Be sure you have the [3D Buildings] layer enabled. You can also view the collection that Arek created in the Google 3D Warehouse.

Of course, even better is viewing the 3D Android statues on an Android device, so here you go!

Great work, Arek!

This spring, for the seventh year in a row, we'll be heading to the Where 2.0 conference in California. This year's event will be held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis from April 2-4.

As they've done in past years, O'Reilly is offering a discount for GEB readers. If you register on their site and use the code 'WHR12GEB', you'll receive 15% off!

Leading up to the event, O'Reilly has quite a few mobile-themed webcasts they'll be showing. You can few them all right here:

We'll certainly be sharing more information about the conference as it approaches, but in the meantime you can visit the conference site at whereconf.com/where2012 or read below for more:

Now in its 8th year, the O'Reilly Where Conference is where the grassroots and leading-edge developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms, and hardware to gain a competitive edge. Where Conference presents leading trends rather than chasing them. Immerse yourself in three full days of hands-on training, information-rich sessions, and an Expo Hall filled with the key players and products. Where's topics and programs include: Mobile Development, Location Development, Business & Strategy, and Marketing, including an all day Location Marketing Boot Camp.

Join with hundreds of experts and practitioners in the mobile and location ecosystems and get a handle on what's happening now and what's lurking just below the radar - and how you can leverage location for your business.

Do you plan on attending Where 2.0 2012?

Note: This is a re-post from this past October, and is very appropriate for today ("Martin Luther King, Jr. Day" in the United States)

Not long after recreating the Stone Mountain sculpture in 3D, Peter Olsen decided to tackle the brand new Martin Luther King National Memorial, located in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As you can see below, his model is amazingly detailed. Not only is the figure of MLK curved and detailed, but the text on the side of the statue is very clear and readable.

However, just like his Stone Mountain model, he found that it was difficult to piece together because some things simply weren't adding up.

In his words:

When you read the literature on the "creation" of the monument, the sculpture consists of a "mountain" (The Mountain of Despair) from which a "stone" (the Stone of Hope) has been pushed. (See the write-up on the official web site) There is also an animation somewhere that I came across that shows the stone centre being pushed out from the middle of the mountain.

So based on that I built the central stone first, as per the above, and was then going to clone the central faces of the mountain from the sides of the stone. There is just one slight problem. Based on numerous photos if have studied, if you take the stone and push it back into the slot in the mountain it does not line up with the cutaway sides of the mountain.

The average person would never notice this anomaly. However, Peter takes great pride in building incredibly accurate models and little missteps like this can be frustrating.

In any case, he did an amazing job with the models. As you can see, he built all three sections of the memorial -- the mountain, the model of MLK, and the memorial wall.

To see it for yourself in Google Earth, simply fly there using this KML file.

As always, great work Peter!