Fly to in Google Earth

Another video post today. Some time ago I was experimenting with the latest update of Google Earth, which at the time was (and still is) version 5. The 'Fly to' function allows you to enter a place name, address or other geographic identifier and when you hit search Google Earth flies there. There's a short video on this on the Google Earth pages.

I find these kinds of tools very useful for teaching and helping students think about spaces and places, though not usually at the global level. There is now even a Flight Simulator in Google Earth, one based on a jet and one based on a slower aircraft - lots of fun, but not totally relevant for teaching planning students...

The short video below starts includes the places I've lived in and/or worked in since I was born and ends at the University of Sheffield, where I currently work.

Still working on things

January has been pretty quiet on the blogging front, but that's because I've been working on papers. One of these is in revision and the other is a new piece of work based on my PhD writings (but it's taken on new life too).

Anyway, more on the former. I'm attempting to revise a paper on flow mapping and to make things more interactive and more effective so I decided that I would build a small site in google sites and then put links to content there. So, if you're at all interested in flow mapping, kml, google sites, GIS, spatial interaction or anything closely related to any of these it may be of interest. If not, it does look quite nice.

There's an introductory page, some information about the data, a few colour maps, direct links to kml files overlaid onto google maps and some links to the KML files on my web space. There's also a few words about me and about the project that all this came from. As you can see, I've also added a slightly psychedelic banner. Link to site here.


In future, I plan to blog a lot more on non-flow-mapping-related issues. It's just that for the past year or so this has been a big part of my work. That's all for now...

Google Earth API - Embed in Web Browser

With the Google Earth API, you can embed and view actual Google Earth imagery in a web browser (you'll need the plug-in). I've been doing some other work relating to dynamic mapping so was looking for ways to implement Google Earth's time lapse functionality in a web browser rather than running it via a kml/kmz file which loads into Google Earth. That's how I came across this. I put the page here rather than on the blog because I wanted it to be separate:

http://ajrae.staff.shef.ac.uk/ge1.html - if your browser says 'load failed' or something similar, just click 'Ok' and where the Google Earth image should be you can install the plug-in from there.

Here's some images:
In the image above, you can see the search box. If I enter, 'Glasgow', for example, it will automatically zoom to here:


If you have a place that occurs in more than one location, then you may have to insert a comma and then enter the city or country it is in. For example, in the image below I've searched for Hillsborough, Sheffield and it's taken me right there...