Aerial imagery of the protests in Egypt

GeoEye has just released some high-resolution imagery of the protests in Egypt, taken over Tahrir Square in Cairo on January 29.

tahrir-protests.jpg

GeoEye does a great job of capturing fresh imagery from a variety of noteworthy events throughout the world. In the past, they’ve provided imagery from Burning Man 2010, the volcano in Iceland last April and President Obama’s inauguration two years ago.

I’ve taken this latest image and added it to Google Earth as an overlay, so you can download this KML file to see it for yourself.

Optimizing your site for TV is now easier

Ever since we launched Google TV last October, we’ve seen web developers optimize their sites for TV with amazing results. However, designing a 10 foot UI and implementing controls optimized for the television is still a foreign concept for most web developers. Understanding that challenge, we’re happy to release new templates and a UI library to make it easy for developers to optimize their sites for TV.

Google TV comes with the Chrome browser that supports familiar technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and Flash. Keeping this in mind, we have created two template designs in HTML5 and Flash that are focused on delivering video content, but equally suitable for photos or other multimedia:

For those developers who prefer to design their own 10 foot UI, we’ve created the Google TV Web UI Library to enable TV friendly controls such as D-pad (up, down, left, right) navigation. To accommodate different web developers needs, the Google TV Web UI Library is provided in 2 different flavors; jQuery based and Closure based. Get started by downloading the library and reading the documentation and tutorials.

Both the templates and the library are available under the Apache 2 license. As always, we love to hear your feedback. Please post comments and questions on the library and templates to our Google TV Web Developer Forum. Happy coding!

Cowboys Stadium, home of this years Super Bowl, looks great in 3D

As recently mentioned on the Google Lat Long blog, Cowboys Stadium — the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and host of the Super Bowl this year — looks amazing in 3D!

Like a few other recent areas, including the guide to Turkey that we posted this morning, the inside of the stadium is built out as well.

cowboys-stadium.jpg

The interior is quite interesting; on one had, they have excellent details such as all of the handrails around the stadium. On the other hand, the imagery for the field itself is quite fuzzy. Still, it’s very cool to be able to fly around inside the stadium.

To see it for yourself, you can fly there in Google Maps “Earth View”, use this KML file to fly there in Google Earth, or watch the short video below that gives a nice tour of the model.