Steve Jobs in Google Earth

 

Steve Jobs undoubtedly had an effect on almost all of the technology that we use today. While he had relatively little impact on products like Google Earth (because Apple never created competing technology to help push things forward), his impact reached all of us.

That said, geospatial technologies can be used to help honor people in a unique way, such as the timeline of Louis Zamperini’s life.

Similarly, Google Maps Mania recently posted a timeline of Steve Jobs’ life. Steven Ho, who recently built the Trip View Bowl visualization, has built a nice tribute to Jobs in Google Earth. It turns Earth into a giant apple, with a silhouette of Jobs’ face on the side.

 

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It’s easily one of the largest 3D models we’ve seen, similar to the pumpkin or the giant mustached smiley face we show you for movember each year. The giant apple is part of a short tour that he created, which also includes music and a quote about Steve.

To see it for yourself, you can view it with the Google Earth Plug-in.

Journey in Google Earth

Last year, Laura Hillenbrand released a book titled “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption“, based on the life of Louis Zamperini (details on Amazon). The book has been very popular, quickly becoming a best-seller and recently being picked up by Universal Studios to be turned into a movie.

The life of Zamperini is amazing, and the book is excellent. Zamperini, a world-class runner that competed in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, is drafted into World War II. He fights a number of missions before his plane goes down and he’s trapped in a raft at sea. After 46 days at sea, he floats into the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, and he’s placed in various POW camps for the next few years.

In reading the book about his journey, I realized that it would pretty cool to track down his various missions and POW camps in Google Earth. I was right! However, I was unable to find a decent timeline of his life, so I spent a few hours researching it and created one myself. After that, I did more research to find all of those locations in Google Earth and ended up with a pretty cool file.

zamp-hawaii.jpg

The file includes locations from his early days (homes, school), the various places he went for military training, the Pacific missions he completed, the POW camps he was placed in, and the various stops on his journey home. You can download the KMZ file here to try it for yourself.

I had hoped that historical imagery might come into play with this, but the old imagery in the Pacific and Japan doesn’t go back nearly far enough (as opposed to Europe, where many locations have historical imagery dating back to the mid-1940’s). However, one good example was Hamilton Field, where he stopped over on his way to Hawaii. The present-day imagery no longer shows a runway, but if you switch to the 1993 imagery you can clearly see the runway still there.

hamilton-field.jpg

All of that being said, I’m sure the file isn’t perfect. If you make any corrections to it, please email me the updated version (mickey@gearthblog.com) and I’ll update this post.