Google Earth Plug-in: Powerful drag-and-drop capabilities with HTML5

HTML5 and the Google Earth Plug-in both have some powerful tools for web developers, and Googler Sean Maday has put together a great demonstration showing how they can work together.

Watch the short video below to see how he built an application that allows you to drag a KML file onto on web page and have it automatically parse the KML and display the data on a map. Even better, he shows an example where he drops a CSV file on the map, which is then geocoded line-by-line with the output being displayed on the map. It’s a very simple yet very impressive demonstration.

Better still, Sean has made all of the code available for you to download and play with. Grab it at sigacts.com/html5/ and see what you can do.

Google Earth is creating a beautiful 3D world

When Google Earth was first released in 2005, people were amazed at the ability to view the entire planet in 3D. Of course, there really wasn’t much 3D on the surface of the globe other than terrain and some gray buildings.

In early 2007, they released Google Earth 4, which included support for photo textured buildings and recently we saw the release of Google Earth 6, which saw the addition of 3D trees.

As a result of those improvements, along with the work of many talented modelers, there are often new stunning features we discover in Google Earth such as the interior model by ‘PeterG’ and the model of The Church of the Nativity of Our Lady by Semenov Nikolay.

Today we have a few new ones for you.

First we have the Leshan Giant Buddha, located in Sichuan, China. The model is stunningly detailed, and can be found in the 3D Warehouse here or you can fly there using this KML file. Frank discovered this one while cruising around in Google Earth, and it’s a beautiful structure.

giant-buddha.jpg

Also, we wanted to highlight the work of Zeljko Zdravkovic, who has published over 500 models in the city of Belgrade! The Google SketchUp Blog did a nice story about Zeljko, and I encourage you to check it out.

For more, you can see all of Zeljko’s 3D Warehouse models, fly to Belgrade using this KML file, or watch the short video below:

What is your favorite 3D building on the globe right now?