Google Alpha Earth

Google Alpha Earth is a new geospatial AI model that acts as a virtual satellite: it assimilates all kinds of geospatial data & does the processing for you. Then, you just ask & get ready-to-use AI-generated 'maps' of whatever you want. No more working with dozens of raw datasets!

Example: glacier mapping. In thed old days you would have spent considerable time finding useful cloud-free images, do some kind of processing, and then run some kind of index or band-ratio calculations. Now you can just ask: give me the size of the Humboldt Glacier over the last 10 years.

For now the focus seems to be on physical data collected by sensors, but I would assume that human data from will be included in the future.

More here: AlphaEarth Foundations helps map our planet in unprecedented detail

StreetWhip

Explore the world by combing Street View & AI in StreetWhip - basically the inverse of all these geo-guessing games.

The Street View Animator

The Street View Animator looks like great fun - more about it over @ Maps Mania.

My only concern is 'permanence' - these types of apps have a tendency to disappear after a while & then all your work disappears as well. This makes it a little risky to committ to it as a teaching tool.

Tourism & AI

Cool combination of tourism & AI: Google Talking Tours. Here Google combines Street View images & panoramas with an AI-generated narrative. Currently this only covers some 55 major sites, but you can easily envison this for literally anywhere.

Guess Where You Are

Guess Where You Are is just a fun geography game using Street View images to let you explore the world - great fun!

Data GIF Maker

Cool: the Data GIF Maker (by Google) is a super-simple animated GIF maker for data / charts.

Google vs. Solar Cycles

 

The Coastline Paradox

The Coastline Paradox is not really a paradox, but rather a pretty slick visualization of sea level rise overlaid on Google Street View images from around the world. Nothing new here, but a cool visualization. The one problem here is that this 'only' shows normal sea level rise and not what happens when you add high tide, rainfall, and maye a storm surge - that's when the greatest impacts will occur.

RAWGraphs & Observable

Two interesting data viz options:

1. RAWGraphs is free and open-source = great!
2. Observable has a free pricing tier & looks similar to Datawrapper.

My personal take: stick with Google Sheets or MS Excel or choose a free and open-source product for your data viz.

Map Channels Tour Maps

From Map Mania: the new Map Channels Tour Maps.

Seems like an easy way to make virtual 3D Street View tour anywhere - well, assuming that Street View data exists.

Map Channels v9

Map Channels v9 seems like a nice & quick tool for making personalized Google Maps - worth a try perhaps!

Climate Change Solutions

Here ar a bunch of reasonable & robust plans out there to get to netzero carbon emissions by 2050 - here's one visualization of some of those plans: How to Get the World to Netzero Carbon Emissions by 2050 – A Graphical Guide.

I especially appreciate thaat the data are included as a shared Google Sheet - that's the way to do it!

High & Low

Here are some cool 360 deg immersive experiences:

• Climbing the Zugspitze
• Climbing El Cap
• Going deep into the Son Doong Cave

KartaView

KartaView is the open version of Google Street View - cool.

Virtual Mars

 These virtual 3D Mars are just cool: Explore with Curiosity and Access Mars.

Interactive Data Viz into PPT

How to embed visualizations in PowerPoint presentations tells you how. Nice.

MS Excel / Google Sheets Tutorial Videos

There are 1,000s of such videos, but I like Vertex42 a lot.

• They are short and complete.
• They often use the same data set for both MS Excel and Google Sheets so it's easy to compare how these two different tools work.
• The data sets are available for download or just require some quick tying and you can follow along step-by-step.

Virtual Globes

Okay - so I confess: I'm not all that into these virtual 3D globes (or 3D in-general). Yes, it's cool and looks impressive. But it is also slow on the hardware and difficult to visualize well.

• Mercator (1541)
• Price (1715)

And then there is this: VGM 2.0 - Virtual Globes Museum

Mercator Globe - © National Maritime Museum by Cyreal.com on Sketchfab

Mapillary

Mapillary is a nice open-source / crowd-source alternative to Google Street View. Get yourself the app and start contributing your own views of the world. Of course, you could stay inside Google and just use their Photo Sphere app.

Joe Kerski shares some idea on how to use Mapillary in Citizen science street level imagery and mapping with Mapillary and here's a nice tutorial on how to embed Mapillary in Esri Story Maps: Taking the Tour: Mapillary in Esri Story Maps.

I played around with the Mapillary app and collected a couple of sequence:

• Sachem Head
• Highland Pond

Not surprising this seems to work much better on flat and easy ground such as roads or dirt roads as opposed to the rocky ridge line of Sachem Head. Maybe a gimbal would work. The sequence export via geojson is pretty lame as you only get the location of the points, but not the associated photographs. Best to view your sequence inside Mapillary.

Is this useful? Sure! You can quickly and easily collect photographs of your research area and share them in a cool way with the rest of the world. If that's something that you want to do. It's also easy to compile sequences into an Esri Story map. It also makes for a fun activity with students - as long as they have a smartphone (and can download the app, create a Mapillary account, and there's Wifi available to upload the photographs).

Google's Earth View

Explore the beauty of planet Earth using Google's Earth View.