A nice little flight around the Great Pyramid of Khufu/Cheops. I’m not sure that a flight like this would even be possible in real life.
Music: “Mandarin” by Peramides
I made this on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn using Google Earth, xvidcap, and avidemux.
Here are the controls. Make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth, 4.2.
My love for Google Earth is no secret. Here are two new items.
First cool Google Earth item:
fboweb.com, a fixed base operator website, has a nice kml file which lets you track individual flights or all inbound traffic for certain United States airports, e.g. LAX, JFK, SFO. Pretty wild stuff. I’m not sure what you’d really use it for though. (My first thought involved stinger missiles… {Also, on that tip, check out this.}) I guess you could use it to plan to fly over some specific landmarks for nice “through the window” shots.
Second cool Google Earth item:
Moving Past Push Pins, a blog by a company making software for Google Earth and other Geo-related applications, has a great post about mashing up data in the form of heat maps:
Below is a screen shot from Google Earth of 600 bars (rated between 1 and 10) in NYC and the location of single women by census block.
Essentially they demonstrate its use to find bars filled with single women.
It’s not yet live, but when this stuff is available as KML links and you can mashup your myspace.com data to find heat maps of all the single or swinging bisexual women in your city of choice, well, to borrow a line from Dennis Miller: “that’s gonna make crack look like Sanka.” (btw, does anybody drink Sanka anymore?)
Others have done this before* , but with the new Google Earth 4 now out of beta, I thought i’d mention it.
Here’s a photo I took in Tokyo near the moat around the East Imperial Gardens.
And here’s a recreation using Google Earth to find almost the same vantage point and angle of viewing with 3D building added:
If somebody could add the textures to those buildings, it would be very very close, all that would be needed after that would some vegatation layer. How long before Google adds that?
Here’s the kmz file if you’d like to see it for yourself.
* pressure under fire?
If you haven’t yet seen or tried Google Earth, you should definitely check it out ASAP. It is amazing.