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San Francisco Typographic Map

HOORAY! The San Francisco typographic map is finally finished and is ready for purchase today. I made a big push to get this map ready for the holidays (with some help from Andy and Ben) and we’re really happy with the way this turned out. More images.

I went a bit overboard and decided to map the *entire* city; The amount of fine detail in this map is pretty astonishing. To fit the entire city onto a poster, of course, means the type itself has to be much smaller to fit it all in. In fact, the street text is half the size of the Chicago map (6 pt surface streets versus 12 pt) so there’s lots of detail for your eyes to enjoy.

GO BIG: Given the crazy density of streets I strongly recommend you get one in poster size (or up) so you can best see all of the parks, water features, and twisty streets the city is famous for.

WHAT’S THIS ABOUT LETTERPRESS?! Great news, we’ll be offering limited edition, gorgeous letterpress prints on rich cotton paper in the first half of 2011. While we love Zazzle (their prints rock), many of you asked (and begged!) for us to do these as hand-made, limited edition art prints and we thought that was a great idea. Want to be the first to know when they go on sale? Go here.

WHAT’S NEXT? We have New York City (Andy) and Washington DC (Ben) coming up shortly. They look sweet.

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Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Today we’re introducing the latest version of Google Earth, our interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools.

In Google Earth 6, we’re taking realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We’ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery. Over the next several days, we’ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite.

Integrated Street View
When Google Earth was first introduced, people were wowed by the ability to virtually fly from outer space right down to the roof of their house. While flying over rooftops gives you a super-human view of our world, the ground level is where we experience our daily lives. We took our first baby steps toward bringing the Google Earth experience to street level with our implementation of Street View in Google Earth in 2008, which enabled flying into Street View panoramas. In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight.

Now, you’ll notice that Pegman is docked right alongside the navigation controls—an ever-present travel companion ready whenever you want to get your feet on the street and take a virtual walk around. Just pick up Pegman and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road to fly right down to the ground. Once there, you can use the navigation controls or your mouse to look around. And unlike our earlier Street View layer, you can now move seamlessly from one location to another as if you’re walking down the street by using the scroll-wheel on your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to visit somewhere farther away, simply click the “exit” button and you’ll immediately return to an aerial view where you can easily fly to your next destination.

Drag and drop Pegman to enter Street View. The blue lines indicate where Street View imagery is available.

3D trees
I think we can all agree that our planet without trees would be a pretty desolate place. Besides the ever-important task of providing us with the oxygen we breathe, trees are an integral part of the landscape around us. In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by. All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree. While we’ve just gotten started planting trees in Google Earth, we already have more than 80 million trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through our Google Earth Outreach program, we’ve also been working with organizations including the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and CONABIO in Mexico to model our planet’s threatened forests.

To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel. As a starting point, try a search for “Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.” Once you arrive at your destination, click the zoom slider. You’ll then be taken down to the ground where you can use our new ground-level navigation to walk among the trees.

3D trees in San Francisco, California

Easy-to-use historical imagery
One of the features people told us they liked best in Google Earth 5 was the availability of historical imagery, which enables you to visually go back in time to see such things as Warsaw in 1935, London in 1945, and Port-au-Prince Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. But it wasn’t always obvious when historical imagery was available for a particular place, making this feature one of Google Earth’s lesser-known gems.

So with this new version, we’ve made it very easy to discover historical imagery. When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period. You can then browse through all the historical imagery available for that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view.

The site of Google’s Mountain View campus in 1948

To download Google Earth 6, or to see videos of our newest features, visit http://earth.google.com.

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3D Trees in Google Earth 6

We strive to provide as much realism as possible in Google Earth, but until now, trees have largely been missing from the landscape of our product. Trees have been modeled individually in a handful of locations, such as Disney World and the Eiffel Tower, and we’ve learned from those instances to make sure we could represent trees in a realistic way that could scale to places where trees exist en masse, like urban parks and large forests.

Over time we’ve developed a way to produce highly detailed, photo-textured versions of specific tree species and reproduce them at large scale. In the new release of Google Earth 6, people in several cities will now be able to browse 3D trees in some of their favorite parks, and maybe even pick out a spot for their next picnic! Our urban tree coverage includes San Francisco (downtown and Golden Gate Park), Chicago (Grant, Millennium and Lincoln Parks), New York City (Prospect and Riverside Parks), Athens (Thiseio Park, the National Gardens, Lykavittos Hill and around the Acropolis), Berlin (Tiergarten Park) and Tokyo (Yoyogi Park, Shinjuku Gyoen and the Akasaka Imperial Grounds). Prospective students can even scope out the beautiful greenery on campus at the University of California, Davis.

With 3D trees in Google Earth, we’ve brought characteristic trees to life, from the palm trees that dot San Francisco’s bayfront Embarcadero Street, to the olive trees that cling to the Acropolis in Athens, to the flowering dogwoods found in Tokyo’s parks. All told, there are around 50 different tree species to explore in Google Earth and counting!

Of course trees also grow and flourish outside of cities. In fact, urban trees only make up a very small percentage of the estimated more than 400 billion trees on our planet. In order to tell the greater story of trees on our planet, we worked with several environmental organizations to model reforestation projects and protected forests in Google Earth. Working with Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, we modeled five tree replanting sites in Kenya. These sites represent just a small part of the Green Belt Movement’s work planting more than 40 million trees to restore the environment and improve the lives of people who are linked to the land.

We also worked with the Surui people, an indigenous group in the Amazon who are working to protect their rainforest from illegal logging. The Surui and one of their partners, the Amazon Conservation Team, selected some of their most culturally significant trees, including the acai palm and the cashew tree, to be modeled for this project. The resulting 3D visualization enables Google Earth users from all over the world to experience the magic of the Amazon rainforest.

Our third partner, CONABIO, supports and protects Mexico’s biodiversity through an ambitious forest monitoring project that tracks changes in forest health and cover over time. This project has helped define priority forests that need urgent attention and protection, like the two mangrove forest areas that we’ve modeled in Google Earth. These forests that hug the Mexican coastline provide unique habitats for wildlife animals like crocodiles and jaguars that depend on these sensitive ecosystems to survive.

This first release of 3D trees in Google Earth includes more than 80 million trees to study and explore. But we’re not content to rest on our virtual laurels, so look out for trees in more cities and forests soon!

To start exploring 3D trees in Google Earth, first download Google Earth 6. Then explore our tree showcase, where you will find links to tours of trees in San Francisco, Tokyo, Athens, the Surui forest, and more.