barnabu

Looking around the various tech reviews of the new Google Earth 5, one new feature seems to have slipped under the radar - the KML tags describing the new touring function include a seriously powerful method for defining smooth motion 3d animation.
I’ve been messing around with this a little, and hacked together a few [...]

Animations Animation, Google Earth, KML, London, Plane, Tour

This is a quick Google Earth timeline animation of the recent satellite collision between the Russian Cosmos 2251 and the US iridium 33.
Update 2009-02-14: Two ways to view this now.
- A Google Earth browser plug-in version
- Or the original KML file for regular Google Earth below
Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 Collide
Use the time [...]

Animations Animation, Cosmos 2251, Google Earth, Iridium 33, KML, Satellites, Visualization

Here’s a browser based version of the (Feb 2009) UK Snowstorm Twitter activity, animated inside the Google Earth Plugin.
This mashes up 3800 Tweets over the course of a week. Users posting their location and the amount of snowfall they were seeing on a scale of 0 to 10. You can see [...]

GE Plugin, Visualization Animation, Google Earth Plugin, Snow, Twitter, UK, Visualization

A much more significant event than the release of Google Earth 5.0 yesterday was the fact the much of Britain (particularly S. England) was covered by a sprinkling of snow.
As a knock-on of this there’s been a large amount of media buzz about the use of Twitter as a mob-sourced geo-mashup [...]

Visualization Animation, Google Earth 5, KML, Snow, Twitter, UK, Visualization

Here’s a Google Earth time animation showing 3176 Walmart store openings in the USA, from 1962 to 2006. See how the business started out with a single retail location in Arkansas, then spread at an accelerating rate across different regions.
Video showing the animation running in Google Earth:

Grab the KML file for Google Earth here:
Walmart [...]

Visualization Animation, Google Earth, History, KML, Visualization, Walmart