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Posts Tagged ‘google earth’

Google’s Street View is already available on all seven continents, providing pedestrian-level vistas of everything from Stonehenge to Antarctica to your own childhood cul-de-sac. Soon, it will be available in some of the planet’s most remote places: The villages of the Amazon rainforest.

Google is documenting the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers, floating the company’s Street View-equipped tricycle atop a riverboat. Local residents will help take some of the pictures, and Google plans to leave some of its equipment in the Amazon so locals can continue doing the work, the company says on its blog.

Workers will pedal the Street View trike down dirt paths in remote Amazon villages, documenting regions that have never even heard of computers, let alone the Internet.

This is all being done in partnership with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon, a local non-profit conservation group. Google says the FAS approached the company two years ago and invited representatives to the area. The FAS believes an Amazon Street View (River View?) would help people understand the area on a more intimate level — they’ll see what a village really looks like, and what it would be like to work in an Amazon school.

“It is very important to show the world not only the environment and the way of life of the traditional population, but to sensitize the world to the challenges of climate change, deforestation and combating poverty,” said FAS project leader Gabriel Ribenboim, speaking to the BBC.

Google is starting out with a 30-mile stretch of the Rio Negro River, extending from the Tumbira community near Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas. No word on whether the native populations are worried about their privacy.

[Google Blog via BBC]

A Canadian company called UrtheCast (don’t ask us why it’s spelled this way) arranged a deal with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to bring two cameras to the International Space Station sometime later this year, where they will be mounted on the exterior. The video will be downlinked to Earth and broadcast online.

One camera will shoot in high-definition, with a frame rate of 3.25 fps, and another will broadcast in lower resolution, offering a three-color image. It will provide the first high-definition continuous video footage of Earth, according to Scott Larson, co-founder and president of UrtheCast, in a promotional video.

The system will work as a sort of mashup between Google Earth and YouTube, Larson says, connecting live footage with maps and other capabilities. Users will be able to pause, rewind and zoom, and view specific times and locations — so long as the ISS was passing overhead at the time.

The camera is made by a UK firm and a Canadian company that worked on the shuttle’s robotic arm provided the software support. UrtheCast is based in Calgary.

UrtheCast hopes to launch the cameras later this year and start broadcasting by early 2012. Watch the dramatic trailer below.

[via Digital Journal]

Seeing the sea floor is just the beginning of the fun. Along the way, Google Earth points out eruptions, sea animals and other scientific points of interest from Hawaii to New York, all in nicely clear high resolution. (You can take a virtual tour through some highlights if the entire ocean world seems overwhelming.) This imagery represents nearly two decades of collected data from research ships that travelled about three million nautical miles and a partnership with scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

It's a pretty amazing tool--finally, there's a reason to venture off the green-brown mass on which we live and venture beneath the blue. At least on Google Maps. We'd understand if you wanted to sit inside today and enjoy your air conditioning.Click here for a glimpse of the underwater experience.

[Google Earth]

Virgin Oceanic is a five-journey proposal, in which they'll hit the Mariana Trench (Pacific), Puerto Rico Trench (Atlantic), Diamantina Trench (Indian), South Sandwich Trench (Southern), and Molloy Deep (Arctic). "They" is Sir Richard Branson (whose cojones can only be measured in cubic miles at this point) and Chris Welsh, an American pilot and explorer. The Puerto Rico Trench is the deepest trench known, and has never been explored.

Their submersible, designed by Graham Hawkes, is one of the more interesting parts of the journey. Shaped more like a dolphin than a traditional submarine, the Virgin Oceanic craft has an operating depth of 37,000 feet--about seven miles--which means it has to be able to withstand outrageous pressure, 1,500 times that of an airplane. Constructed of carbon fiber and titanium (with a quartz dome), the craft is currently undergoing tests--at that depth, the smallest crack would result in certain death for the pilots, both due to the immense pressure (13 million pounds) and the simple fact that there exist no other vehicles capable of a rescue mission. The sub travels at a maximum of three knots, and can dive at 350 feet per minute, so a dive to the bottom of the Mariana trench and back would take around five hours.

The sub is equipped with all the usual sensors and cameras, which should come in handy as this isn't--or at least isn't only--a swashbuckling "let's see if we can do it" mission. Knowledge of the ocean at this depth is, without exaggeration, at 0%--we have no idea what's going on down there, which is why Virgin is working closely with both Google and the renowned Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and with a host of other scientists from some of the best marine studies departments in the country.

Though further tests need to be carried out before the first expedition begins, Virgin Oceanic expects to dive the Mariana Trench sometime this year, with the remaining four dives spaced out throughout the following two years.

[Virgin Oceanic]

The goal would require gathering unprecedented amounts of information about the planet and its societies

Such "reality mining" would track everything from financial transactions to individual travel itineraries, from medical records to carbon dioxide emissions. If computer modelers can pull off the feat of simulating not only the planet's systems but also every one of its inhabitants, it could potentially lead to simulating the future in a way similar to how weather forecasters predict the weather.

That astounding vision is the brainchild of Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Helding's desire for such real-time knowledge of the Earth stems from his leadership in the emerging field of techno-socio-economic studies, and perhaps reading a bit much of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and dreaming of psychohistory's predictive powers.

Plenty of supercomputers already run complex simulations focused on financial markets or climate change. NASA has also joined forces with Cisco to launch a $100 million "Planetary Skin" network that integrates all sorts of ground, sea, air and space sensors -- perhaps a bit of a precursor to what Helding has in mind.

That's not to say that the project might not need a heck of a lot more money than $1.3 billion, assuming that the European Commission approves it. But Technology Review suggests that the alternate to a publicly funded effort is a darker vision of such predictive power in the hands of a single corporation, or perhaps one nation's military. In that spirit, we'd suggest that there's no time like now to start -- hopefully any such model incorporates the zoom and swoop options available in Google's Liquid Galaxy engine.

[via Technology Review]

What was once a kind of grainy, pixelated experience -- at least if you zoomed in really tight -- is now much more like the real deal. Building facades and architectural nuances are in focus, storefronts are legible, and landmarks can be explored in a far more realistic fashion than before. You could even argue that the ability to fly through cities, experiencing them from both ground level and from their upper stories and beyond, beats pounding the pavement yourself.

Currently, the 3-D experience is limited to a smattering of international cities -- New York, Cape Town, London, etc. -- but more 3-D-enabled locales are surely on the way, as Google's mission is, after all, to catalog everything in the world. You can take a spin around NYC below.

[PC Authority]