The new 3D cities on Google Earth for Android

Explorers of the world, rejoice! There is now a new way to explore the world, right from the palm of your hand. Gone are the days when the only way to get a bird’s eye, 3D view of your favorite metropolitan area was from the window of a penthouse apartment or helicopter. Now you can soar above your favorite cities in 3D, with Google Earth for mobile.

 

New 3D Imagery

We recently shared a preview of this striking new 3D imagery and starting today, you can take flight yourself with our latest version of Google Earth for Android. An updated version of Google Earth for iOS will be also be available soon.

 

 

 

New 3D imagery of Portland, Oregon

Creating this comprehensive 3D experience is possible due to advanced image processing. Using 45-degree aerial imagery, we’re able to automatically recreate entire metropolitan areas in 3D. This means every building (not just the famous landmarks), the terrain, and any surrounding landscape of trees are included to provide a much more accurate and realistic experience.

 

Get started today by taking a virtual flight over one of our initial 3D imagery cities: Boulder, Boston, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Antonio, Charlotte, Tucson, Lawrence, Portland, Tampa, Rome or the San Francisco Bay Area (including the Peninsula and East Bay). We’ll continue to release new 3D imagery for places around the world over the coming months; by the end of the year, we aim to have new 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people.

Tour Guide

Not sure where to begin? Let the new tour guide help show you the way. We’ve put together short tours of thousands of famous places and historical sites across the globe so it’s easier than ever to discover amazing places. Just pull up the tab at the bottom of the screen to open the tour guide. Each image highlights a tours or place of interest in the area you are looking. Click on an item and you will be flown there. As you fly in and around the sites, snippets from Wikipedia provide additional information about the location. It’s like having a local expert right beside you!

 

 

Tour guide showing top destinations around Los Angeles.

We hope this more accurate, comprehensive and realistic 3D representation of the Earth brings out the inner explorer in you. Whether you are visiting familiar grounds or venturing out into the world, Google Earth is there to show you the way.

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Armstrong on Pushing Through

 

“Pain is temporary.
Quitting lasts forever.”

– Lance Armstrong (1971 – )

American cyclist

7-time Tour de France champion

cancer survivor

In 1996, Armstrong was 25 (and ranked the No. 1 cyclist in the world) when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that spread to his stomach, lungs, and brain. Doctors gave him less than a 40% chance of survival.

Two years later, after a miraculous recovery, he got back on a bike but quit a race in Paris realizing he wasn’t ready (ironic given today’s quote).

The following year (and the next 6), he won the Tour de France and retired as the only person to win it seven times.

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“Proud to call Garmin a great workplace”

 

 

In my job, I get to talk a lot. To customers at expos. To journalists at trade shows. To fellow runners at races. To fellow cyclists at rides. To geocachers at events. To the camera in a tutorial video. To you in this blog. Usually I’m talking about our newest products, their coolest features, and how they can help all of you get a little (or a lot) more out of your favorite activities. But recently a local news crew wanted to talk about how great it is to have Garmin as part of the Kansas City area. The weekly “Proud to Call it Home” segment showcases local businesses and organizations, what makes them unique and what they add to our community. So that day, my job was to talk about how much I love my job. After Jon, our VP of Communications, shared his perspective on our company’s local start and global growth, I gave the camera crew a tour of our facilities. You can watch the video and read the story here, as what started as a 20-minute chat lasted more than two hours. Partly because I like to talk, but mostly because I had great stuff to talk about.

 

I discussed our vertical integration, and how engineers and salespeople and writers and designers all have a voice in product development. But it’s not just our brilliant, creative, energetic people who make Garmin a great place to work. It’s that we’re encouraged to pursue our passions and live a healthy, active lifestyle. And as a leader in the outdoor and fitness industries, that just makes sense. So I enjoyed showing off our fitness rooms full of folks on exercise equipment and colleagues playing table tennis and foosball. I invited them to my office, which has my bike perched against the wall while waiting to hit the road before or after work or over lunch. And when the tour wrapped up and the cameras were packed away, I realized that it’s not hard work talking about a great workplace.

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SketchUp: U.S. Green Building Council’s headquarters

 

You could call our friends at Igloo Studios “multi-taskers”. While they mainly concentrate on creating products and plugins for designers and architects, they also have a podcast, a SketchUp training program and a popular book.

Their latest project is a virtual tour of the U.S. Green Building Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Note: you’ll need the Google Earth plugin installed to view).

This project is cool for lots of reasons. For starters, USGBC’s 75,000-square-foot facility is loaded with efficient and innovative green features that have earned the building a LEED Platinum rating. Professionals regularly tour the USGBC for real-world examples of successful green practices.

 

However, not everyone has the luxury of being able to visit Washington DC, so Igloo Studios built this one-of-a-kind Google Earth tour of the building. Using a custom instance of the Google Earth plugin and building product catalogs from the 3D Warehouse, Igloo was able to create a tour of both the exterior and interior of the building! 

As you navigate through the 3D building, you’ll notice it’s jam-packed with other goodies like a guided audio tour, photos and embedded videos. You can even click on the building’s materials and products to learn more about the green tech used in its construction.Once you finish the tour, you can launch a test that will earn you the same continuing education credits that you would get for taking the live tour.

And the coolest feature of all: if you find a building product during the tour that might be useful in one of your projects, you can download it directly into your SketchUp design!

 

Learn about building materials and then bring them into your model 

If you’re interested in learning more about how your products or buildings can be visualized in this way.

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Massive artwork in Google Earth

 

Over the past 13 years sculptor Andrew Rogers, with the help of over 6,700 volunteers, has created 47 structures in 13 different countries.

 

rhythms.jpg 

The structures are large enough to be seen using Google Earth, which is why Andrew put together a Google Earth tour to show them all off. You can download the tour here and see all of his great works of art. One great feature of the tour is that it is designed to automatically switch to historical imagery when it provides a better view of the art work, showing each piece off in the best possible imagery.

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