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I just made a work “2012 Kaohsiung International Marathon in Google Earth” (Chinese) by my unique animation method. I found the 3.5 Km “Fun Run” path with street view. So I got an idea to record the street view tour along this path with marathon signs (direction and mileage) . This is an innovative way. Share to Everyone!

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Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan, with a population around 2.9 million, located in southwestern Taiwan. It is a center for manufacturing, refining, shipbuilding, and other light and heavy industries.

Urban Development Bureau of Kaohsiung City Government took a project of aerofoto for several years. When those photographs are enough, thereby they established a website of “great aerial view of Kaohsiung“. Those photographs are open to the public to download.

With such a good resource, I can not help my desire to create. I make a photos tour controller. Press “Start” to start the 66 aerofotos tour. “+” for accelerate, “-” for decelerate, “||” for pause and you can zoom this photo, “>>” for next photo, “<<” for prev poto. Enjoy it!

There is a big event in this year’s last day in Taiwan, It’s a nationwide cycling trip set to break record.

The activity is designed for participants to cycling around Taiwan, including surrounding islands Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang counties. The total length is about 1,000km. There will be 100,000 departure points around Taiwan. It is free to join, anyone can choose their preferred departure point and register on line. At 10:00AM, Dec. 31th, 2011, millions of riders will start to cycle in a clockwise direction. Media will broadcast the event lively. 3G smart phone holders can download official APP, which delivers personal GPS signals during the ride. Their riding progress could be immediately checked on their specific web page on the official web site. Furthermore, audiences can also share this moment through internet.

This event is under application of Guinness World Record “Largest parade of bicycles (multiple venues)”.

For me, this is a rare opportunity to show the event in Google Earth. So I made this work, in addition to Youtube above, but you can also download the KMZ file to see the big event.

[20111231 Update]
Event Sets World Record

At about 4:50 p.m., Tong Cheng from the Guinness World Record authenticated the event as a record-breaking one with a total of 72,919 participants.

The previous world record for the most bikers riding at once stood at 48,615, which was set in Italy in 2000, with 48,615 people cycling at the same time.

The IDA Congress is the first event for conversations between designers and non-design stakeholders in the form of summit. The 2011 IDA Congress marks the alliance’s inaugural event since its establishment in 2005. Taipei was selected as the host city after an international competitive bid process.

Exhibitors of the 2011 Taipei Design Expo cover 55 enterprises, 50 design studios, 26 design schools, and 43 design promoting organizations from 18 countries, including Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, China, USA, UK, France, Holland, German, and Russia. The Exhibitions are held in SongShan Cultural & Creative Park(09/30~10/30), Nangang Exhibition Hall(10/22~10/30), TWTC Exhibition Hall 1(10/22~10/30).

The Trip View Bowl ‘s mission given by the 2011 IDA Congress Taipei was to make “the Design at the edges” commemorative bowl. It took about 1 year and more than 6 hundred people to accomplish this mission— these trip view bowls will be given as gifts to three thousand guests, and we hope these bowls would be collected by all the top designers who attend this event as shared collections cherished by all.

This delicate art craft, designed and produced by the Trip View Bowl, has been recorded in “Full Record of making Songshan Creative & Cultural Park bird’s eye view map” , and they used the movie “The Edge” to express it. I could’t wait to participate in this “creation” after I saw their fantastic work, so I used my Google earth application skill to perform “the Confrontation between trip view bowl and Google earth in Taipei”.

This work contains mainly two parts:

The bird’s eye view image of “Trip View Bowl” is actually half of the earth’s surface. It can be transformed into a half sphere panorama map. Then we can use GE PhotoOverlay. After zoom-in, we can see it very clearly. The original photo has just the same resolution as the 12cm-diameter blue and white porcelain bowl, and 600 designers hide in it.

The second part took me lots of efforts : I made a movie with 37 seconds of music; I put the blue and white porcelain bowl on the ground in the original size. It started to become bigger and bigger, up and up, eventually it achieved over 120 meters. And it began to spin, then we fly into the bowl, fly to the sky of Taiwan, we rocket to the outside of the planet earth , the universe. This blue and white porcelain bowl keeps going up, enlarges itself, and it “holds” our beautiful planet — earth, put the earth into the bowl. What’s next, the earth rotates inside of the bowl. Finally, we go back to Songshan Creative & Cultural Park, fly along the bowl’s edge, and the background is the mapping landscape of Taipei .

At last, the expo and the exhibition will explode a bomb of design in a few days. I hope everyone who saw this work will join this great show of collective work of all the creative designers. Together we will make the world better and “speak” our voice loud. Thanks for your time and I really hope you like it.

Tang, a Google Supermodeler, made a whole campus models for his mother school, NTIT (National Taichung Institute of Technology) in May. That’s a great job! I appreciated his work, so I made about 100 panos (Home-made street view) around the whole campus at the same time. Finally, I made this campus tour with panos (as reality) and models (as virtual). You can press the “Start” button to enter the pano tour at first. Then you can simply drag the left image around to view any particular area, and the right image will stay in sync automatically.

Since my previous work, “NTU Campus Azalea Festival Google Earth Street View Tour” (also named “Home-made Street View” by GEB administrator Frank Taylor). I have made many several thousands of panos by my “Home-made” method .

Recently I just finished a total of approximately 1670 Panos (also can be viewed from your browser)  over National Taiwan University main campus (about 270 acres). Because the Google Street view does not cover in NTU Campus. It almost took me more than one year to make that happened. Also, lots of 3D models in the NTU are made during that time. Now I am willing to share my knowhow to you, google earth fans.

“Home-made Street View” can be roughly made by the following steps:

Of course, you need to take some photos by using your cameras. A SLR camera and fisheye lens are highly recommended, for example, I used Nikon D200 and a 10.5mm fisheye.

Then, we have to plan locations and routes where we want to take photos. When the location is confirmed, I first removed the lens cap and put it on the ground as an axle point. Then, hold your camera in the vertical direction, which should be just above the lens cap, to take photos. That is “be yourself as moving tripod!”. The lens cap should be seen in the bottom of photos.

Then, take one photo in every 60 degree and you will have 6 photos (6×60=360 degree) to take panoramic photos based on the axle point. Finally, hold your camera in the horizontal direction and take two photos on your top left and top right direction. We will totally have 8 photos (6 for panoramic, and 2 for top left and top right) at that point.

Please see the following YOUTUBE for the illustration of taking photos.

I used PTGui for stitching. Pulling those 8 photos into PTGui. Because we did not use the professional pano tripod to keep the photos horizontally, we have to manually adjust the photos more or less in the PTGui. At the end, export the photos into a 2:1 panorama.

Pulling this panorama into an image processing software, such as Photoshop to adjust brightness, stitched part, mosaicing face, car plate number, and image file compression etc.

By using the free software, PhotoOverlay creator, we can do image pyramid processing and generate a KML file, which will be ready for presenting in the Google Earth.

When you make many panos in the KML, there will be crowded points shown in the Goole Earth, This is a little bit not what we really want. We want to make the panos shown depends on the zoom scale. Although, we can use “Regionating” funtions in the Google Earth, which is available in the Pro version, it still showed the dispersion of cluster of points. That’s not what we want, either. Therefore, I made the regionate process with kml <region> tag manually.

Street View in Google Earth uses the special Photo Viewer tool which lets you pan around the inside of a 3D projected photo. This title “Using Street View in Google Earth“, describes the more details. You can see other nearby Street view camera icon when you are in Street view. By double-click the camera icons, you can fly straight into the Street view. But now, when Google Earth upgrade to 6.0 , we cannot see any nearby Street view camera icon. That means you can’t move directly from Street view. That’s a big blow to me. I hope Google Earth team can fix this problem.

<This post was reviewed by Calvin C. JUNG >

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In February this year, my three friends went to himalaya for hiking. According to their travel and photo album, combined with the Google Earth application, I made ​​this work. I call it “Himalaya Dream Travel in Google Earth “. Because for this work finished, I really have been there just like real, although I’ve never been there.

This work uses a number of Google Earth technology, such as:
1.Gokyo Ri Peak Panorama
I stitched six photos and used PhotoOverlay function to view ​​this panorama.
2.Gokyo Ri Tour
I used the GE tour function, with dynamic route approach, recorded the airline starting from Taiwan Taoyuan airport via Hong Kong, Dhaka, Kathmandu, then took the small plane to Lukla (a portal of Mt. Everest) , and then flied along the Dudh Kosh river, until the top of Gokyo Ri, and Looked around 360 degree with panorama photo.
3.Photo Tour
I chose 31 photos with the spatial location of features from the album , and geotaged them in Google Earth, and adjusted their “snapshot view” at the same angle with the shooting, recorded them by Google Earth tour function, then made this “Photo Tour”.
4.Observatory
I made this virtual observatory on Gokyo Ri Peak by PhotoOverlay function. I designed the orientation lines every 10 degrees around. and show the surrounding hills with title.
5.GE Photo Album
Photo Album is very popular now. But if we can locate those photos to real position will be better, so I designed this Google Earth photo album (I call it “GE Photo Album”). I you click the photo in album ,and you will fly to the shooting position in Google Earth , and show this photo at the same snapshot view with the shooting.

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Mt. Everest — Or known as Mt. Chomolungma in Tibetan and Sagarmāthā (Nepali: सगरमाथा) — is the world’s highest mountain at 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) above sea level . According to the record, thousand of people tried to conquered the Mt. Everest and thus failed.

In May 29, 1953, both Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay break the record. Finally, they reached the top of Mt. Everest for the first time. Since then there are more than 1,000 had followed their foot step make it to the summit. Nobody knows the exact number. However, there are more than 140 climbers died on the way.

On 24th of May, 1989 the Australian photographer and mountaineer Roderick Mackenzie reached the summit. He was number 271 since 1953. Most importantly, he had taken a 360 degree panorama from the top which as far as I know is the only one exist. You may see it in the Panoramas.dk website.

A few days ago, when I saw this panorama by an occasional chance. It has a big visual impact on me. I would think that most of the people would like to know the surrounding hills, it’s orientation, so as to more presence as I do.

I am very pleased that Google Earth has recently added a “mountain” layer to their application. So I do not need to make effort to look for additional information from other sources. I made those mountain placemarks around Mt. Everest based on the “mountain” layer. And based on the distance from the Mt. Everest, I set different image size of title of mountains so you can see the same mountain title size from the summit observatory.

I also designed the upper and lower windows, you can enter into the panorama in upper window , moving the panorama , it will synchronize the lower window to show the title of the mapping of the mountain.

Unfortunately, I can not find the zooming parameter of PhotoOverlay function in the Google Earth API , therefore, I cannot control the lower window to zoom at the same time. I hoped that Google Earth API can provide these features.

In addition, if you want to fly to the top of Mount Everest using Google Earth to feel real, you can also download “the Panorama kmz file” and “Everest’s observation kmz file“, please enjoy !

<This post was reviewed by Chiuwen Ray >

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These images come from @EarthOutreach. Also, they’ve just created a special Google Map to show all of the fresh imagery they’ve pushed out. With these images, I use two Google Earth windows to show the two affected areas before and after images for easy comparison. You can click directly on top of the nine locations to fly there, you can only control the left side window, zooming, moving, the right side window will be synchronized movement.