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Google Maps with WebGL

Google has just introduced a test mode on Google Maps that enables WebGL to help draw the maps, and the results have moved it a step closer to Google Earth. If you’re using a WebGL-enabled browser, such as a recent version of Google Chrome or the new Firefox beta, you’ll see a note in the lower left corner of Google Maps inviting you to try it out.

The result is a much smoother experience; lots of animations to ease the transitions when zooming in, rotating 45 degree imagery, or switching into Street View. It also enables the transparent 3D buildings like you’ll see in the Android version of Google Maps.

All in all, it feels very similar to the Android version of Maps, with a few exceptions:

1 — You can’t angle your view or rotate the map, with the exception of the 45 degree imagery. On Android, you can angle and rotate freely on the street maps.

2 — The new transparent 3D buildings in Google Maps now cast shadows, which is a nice effect not seen in the Android version. Even better, as +Nick Altmann pointed out, the shadows are time-of-day (and likely day-of-year) accurate! Very cool. Here’s a screenshot of Los Angeles, taken around 3:45pm local time:

It’s certainly no where near the depth of Google Earth (or the Google Earth Plug-in, also available inside of Google Maps), but it’s another step in that direction. It’s possible that the products could one day merge, but it seems that we’re still quite a distance from that.

Google Earth: 3D trees in Portland, Oregon

Thanks to sharp-eyed GEB reader ‘Donovan’, it appears that Google has just released thousands of 3D trees in Portland, Oregon (and possibly some other cities).

When Google Earth 6 was released, they included 3D trees in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Athens, Tokyo and Berlin. In March they added trees to London in preparation for the royal wedding. In June, they added trees to Philadelphia, Boston, London and a few other cities in the California Bay Area. They followed that up in September with trees in Boulder, Denver and Los Angeles. Now we have Portland.

The tree releases have been fairly spread out, but this update comes barely a month after the previous release, so hopefully they’ll be rolling these updates out at a more rapid pace.

Google hasn’t officially announced this release, so there could be additional cities in there as well.

The New Google Earth 6.1

Google Earth 6.1 has just been released, and it comes with a handful of very nice features. You can download the new version here.

Changes to “Places”
With our ever-growing collections of saved Places in Google Earth, they’ve added a few tools to help us keep them organized. If you have a folder full of places, you can now click on that folder and sort them all from A-Z. In addition, there is now a small search bow at the bottom of your “places” window that allows you to search within your saved places to find items.

Changes to Street View
Late last year, Google added some big improvements to the Street View mode in Google Earth 6. They’ve now refined it a bit further by allowing you to single click to move to a new location (instead of requiring a double-click) and they’ve improved the zoom feature. Now you’re able to use the slider control on the right side of the screen to zoom in and out with much greater control. Street View in Google Earth also has a slightly wider field of view, similar to that found in Google Maps.

New lengths in ruler
We just showed you some great ways to use the Google Earth ruler a few weeks ago, and it had a minor change with this update. When using the “line” tool, instead of just telling you the length of the line, it will show you the “map length” along with the “ground length” of the line, which can vary slightly.

New fonts for street/place labels
It’s hard to tell exactly what they’ve done, but it appears the fonts have been reduced in thickness (un-bolded, sort of), but also increased slightly in size. In any case, they’re a bit easier to read.

Minor tweaks in the sidebar
Along with the changes to the “Places” section, they’ve revamped some of icons over there, and turned the (+) folder expansions into soft arrows, to make it look a bit less harsh.

New settings in “Tools –> Options”
You can now set the “Units of Measurement” to use your system default (rather than specifically choosing feet vs. meters)

“View –> Reset” menu option
This is still accomplished more easily with the keyboard, but you now have some options to reset your view with the menu. If you’d prefer to reset with the keyboard, you can press “n” to face north, “u” to reset to a top-down view, or “r” to reset both.

“Help –> Upgrade to Google Earth Pro…” menu option
A very minor addition; another bit of encouragement to upgrade to Google Earth Pro. Clicking this simply loads an informational page on what you’ll get in Google Earth Pro.

Updates in Google Earth Pro
Speaking of GE Pro, 6.1 has brought some nice updates to that product on top of the updates listed above including enhancements to the printing layout, movie maker and better support for proxies and SSL certificates. They also tied the elevation profile into the ruler tool, saving a step when working with paths, as shown in the screenshot here. More details about the Google Earth Pro updates can be found on the Google Enterprise Blog.