New partnerships with nature- and environment-oriented groups offer videos, photos and blogs for specific locations.
Touring a virtual planet earth, zooming in on environmental hotspots and comparing today’s crisis zones with yesterday’s areas of natural beauty have all become possible thanks to a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Google Earth.
Google has added more video and other bonus features for users of its popular three-dimensional mapping software to unearth even more information about destinations around the world. Google Earth’s latest attractions, activated by clicking on a "featured content" box, include online video of cities and popular tourist attractions provided by Discovery Networks and Turn Here, an Emeryville, Calif.-based startup.
Google’s 3D virtual world browser — now provides the option to use “UNEP: Atlas of our Changing Environment,” which offers satellite images of 100 environmental hotspots from around the world.
The latest innovations unveiled recently are available to any computer with Google Earth software installed.
The new content includes a timeline of environmental changes over the past 30 years, video clips of landmarks and places of interest, and guided tours of cities.
The five initial content providers for the project are National Geographic, Discovery Networks, the US National Park Service, the Turn Here video travel guides, and the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation.
Available to All
"Google Earth Featured Content is a way for Google to connect users with really compelling, high-quality information being illustrated and shared on Google Earth," said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps.
The search giant apparently hopes to encourage curiosity about the world–and its Google Earth map application–by offering overlays of content from the United Nations Environment Program, the Jane Goodall Institute, the U.S. National Park Service and the Discovery Network, alongside its satellite imagery.
“Think of it as a browser to fly around the planet and discover things about the Earth,” said Hanke.
The UNEP overlay includes time-stamped images that illustrate 100 areas where environmental impact is most clearly noticeably, for example in the shrinking forests of the Amazon or the declining Aral Sea in Central Asia, or the Kilimanjaro geographical point on Google Earth, for example, now includes an icon that brings people to a 1976 satellite image of the snow-capped mountain, as well as a more current image sans snow, Hanke said. “A timeline slider bar lets people move between the two images to view the significant change.”
The Discovery Network is contributing three-to five-minute clips of existing nature and travel channel programs. The Discovery Networks World Tour gives users the chance to watch videos about major world attractions, like King Tutankhamun’s tomb and various landmarks in cities. (Google Earth previously linked to a more limited amount of Discovery content.)
The Jane Goodall Institute is using Google Earth to map the habitat of its chimpanzees in Tanzania, Hanke added. With the Jane Goodall Institute’s involvement, users can visit Gombe preserve chimpanzees and follow their progress via a blog in Google Earth, while Turn Here gives free insider video guides to various cities, including New York and smaller places like Halmstad, Sweden. Photos, blogs and RSS feeds from the scientists observing and tracking specific chimpanzees in Africa will now be featured on Google Earth for public view.
“The Jane Goodall Institute is a great partner and we are thrilled that it has been able to leverage the power of Google Earth to tell the story of its chimpanzee research,” said Hanke.
Government Chips In
Meanwhile, the federal government also is providing information on more than 10,000 trails from 58 U.S. National Parks, has been overlaid on top of satellite images of actual trails. Photos of select vistas are also included.
The new video, photo and blog content are immediately available on Google Earth as part of the free download, the company said. All of the new content will be available under Google Earth’s "Layers" section, Hanke said. Existing users do not need to upgrade to a new version of Google Earth software in order to see the new features.
The project builds on the success of UNEP’s popular hardcover release “One Planet, Many People: Atlas of our Changing Environment”.
“These satellite pictures are a wake-up call to all of us to look at the sometimes devastating changes we are wreaking on our planet,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.
Through spectacular imagery, Google Earth and UNEP offer a new way of visualizing the dangers facing our planet today. By tapping into the global Google community, we are able to reach out to millions of people who can mobilize and make a difference, he said.
Google Earth technology already allows a more informative and accessible means of delivering information about our changing environment — said the project coordinator, Ashbindu Singh, of UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment.
By keeping pace with the changing world of technology and media, UNEP helps the environmental community keep pace with the real changes in our real world, said Mr. Singh.
The latest Google Earth upgrades come three months after the Mountain View, Calif.-based company expanded the satellite imagery used in the software to quadruple the amount of land covered, enabling about one-third of the global population to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhood.
The new features are not available through Google’s mapping Web site.
Google says more than 100 million copies of the software have been downloaded since it was first offered to the general public last year, making it one of the company’s most successful products outside its industry-leading Internet search engine.
The interactive content announcement follows a presentation in London by Google Earth Chief Technical Officer Michael Jones of the timeline slider bar, now available on the free version of Google Earth. The feature, which lets people view photos of a single location over years, was previously exclusive to the premium version, Google Earth Pro.
The mapping software is free for Windows, Mac and Linux computers, although premium versions are available for sale.