Announcing the winners of the Street View trike contest

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

​The polls have closed, the votes have been tallied and the people have spoken: it’s time to announce the winners of our Street View trike suggestions contest. Last October, we gave Street View fans the opportunity to vote for the special attractions around the United States that they most want to see featured on Google Maps. In the first round, we received more than 25,000 suggestions, which we narrowed down to the 24 finalists that were put up to a public vote. All in all, nearly a quarter million votes were cast.

The most popular category among all voters was University Campuses, racking up nearly 70,000 votes. Topping the list was Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York). Reminiscing alumni, prospective students or empty-nest parents will be able to tour the university through Street View for a unique look at campus life.

Cyclists also came out in droves to cast their ballots for their favorite riding spots, and the Boulder Creek Path (Boulder, Colorado) rode away with victory in the Parks & Trails category. Our trike riders — and the avid bike riders in Google’s Boulder office — are looking forward to the chance to take a ride along this scenic 5½-mile greenway.

History buffs, potential tourists, and online window-shoppers will soon be able to take a virtual stroll through the grounds of Faneuil Hall Marketplace (Boston, Massachusetts), the most popular submission in the Pedestrian Malls category.

In the National Landmarks category, voters elected a location that actually encompasses many of the United States’ most famous landmarks, including the Smithsonian Insitution museums, the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building. That’s right: the National Mall in Washington, D.C. emerged victorious.

The manually-pedaled trike will soon be making its way to the Motor City to ride through the Detroit Zoo, the top vote-getter in the Theme Parks & Zoos category. With this imagery, families and animal lovers will be able visit the kangaroos and wallabies from the Australian Outback Adventure and the polar bears in the Arctic Ring of Life.


We’re now working directly with each of the winning organizations to arrange a visit from our trike in the coming months, so don’t be surprised if you see this quirky contraption at your favorite destination sometime soon:



​Because so many of you – 238,000, to be exact – expressed a desire to have the trike visit your favorite place, we'll also be working with many of the other finalists, so stay tuned for more exciting special collections from our trike. And if you happen to manage or work at another attraction that you think absolutely needs to be featured in Street View, please let us know!

Posted by Dan Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer

Resources for Chile earthquake response

After hearing of the devastatingly powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile overnight, we began to mobilize several teams to see what Google resources could help with disaster response.

Google Map Maker is currently available in Chile, and we are making this map data available for download by relief and aid organizations. Visit http://mapmaker.google.com/datadownload for more information and to access the data. If you have familiarity with the region, please help these efforts by contributing data about Chile on Google Map Maker. We will be refreshing the download data frequently to reflect the latest set of contributions.

For those concerned about loved ones in Chile, the Person Finder tool, initially created in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, can be used to submit or search for information about individuals who may have been affected. The Person Finder tool has been translated into Spanish and is currently available at http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/, as well as several media sites and the US Department of State website. The gadget can easily be embedded on any site:

This My Map shows earthquake measurement data from the US Geological Survey to help give a better understanding of the areas most affected and the extent of the powerful aftershocks:

View Chile Earthquake helpful information in a larger map. This map will continue to be updated with additional information.

We will be updating imagery, maps, and other information as they become available and will continue to post updates to this blog. An overview of resources available, latest news, and links to make a donation can be found on Google's Chile earthquake relief page at http://www.google.com/relief/chileearthquake/.

Posted by Jessica Pfund, Google Map Maker team

Athens, Greece in 3D

No knowledge is ever wasted. In college I took three semesters of Greek civilization because I thought it was nifty (and apparently I also had some plan involving never graduating, but that eventually fell through). Although this makes me more fun at parties than I'd otherwise be, I have had no practical use for the information. Until now!

We're pleased to announce the addition of Athens, Greece to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. No trip to virtual Athens would be complete without a visit to the Parthenon. The architecture of the Parthenon is fascinating; all of its lines exhibit subtle curvature (the columns, for example, are slightly convex) in order to avoid the optical illusion of concavity resulting from parallel lines viewed at a distance. While you're on the Acropolis, duck over to the Herodeion Theater, where for almost two thousand years music and theater performances have been held -- check out its schedule during the Athens Festival.

With the 2010 Winter Olympics in progress, naturally the site of the revival of the modern Olympics comes to mind. The 1896 Summer Olympics were held here; also, check out the Athens Olympic Stadium and sports complex constructed for the 2004 Summer Olympics. If your tastes run more towards archaeology, there's the Archaeological Museum, where you can see the Antikythera Mechanism among many other artifacts. Count on a geek to be interested in ancient mechanical computers...

Enjoy!

Posted by Allison Floyd, Software Engineer

Navigate your way through user photos in Street View

With Street View in Google Maps, you can explore millions of images taken in places across the world. But the photographs you see are based on what the cameras on top of our cars, driving on public roads, can capture (or, in a few cases, what the cameras on our trike or even perched on a snowmobile can capture). That's one reason why we began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to. Today, we're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View.

Let's say you are planning a vacation to Prague and want to get a sense of the area before you go there. You go to Street View and start looking around, finally ending up at the historic plaza where the road ends:

Even though you can't go inside the pedestrian-only plaza with Street View, you can click on the User Photo thumbnail in the upper right corner to enter our photo navigator. That allows you to view a variety of user-submitted photos from Picasa, Panoramio, and Flickr that present a look at some buildings in the plaza:

While navigating through user photos, you'll now notice "orbs" - small silver circles - that hover on and around many user photos. These new click-and-drag controls appear when there are neighboring photos for a location. By clicking or dragging these orbs, you can move to a new nearby photo. Polygons surrounding the zoom orbs show the approximate location of the next image when zooming in:

Clicking the highlighted orb in the middle of the polygon will take you to this picture, which is a closer shot of the buildings covered by the polygon:

Clicking again on the highlighted orb in the user photo above will show you a close-up photo of the details on the building's facade:

You'll find that there are two kinds of orbs: ones that allow you to zoom, and ones along the border of the image that allow you to pan around the location. We wanted to make the experience of navigating user photos more consistent with the smooth Street View experience you know and love, so you can now also drag anywhere in an image to pan. As you click and drag the photo, you'll see the next picture transition into view:

Besides coming from Street View, you can also get to user photos using the Photo Layer in Google Maps (under the 'More' button). For instance, following this this link you can get to a cool view of the plaza from a tower, and then you can easily browse to other photographs also taken from the tower. You should try it out for yourself to really get the feel for this seamless new navigation experience, but here's a short video that will also give you a walk-through of this feature:

Our personal suggestion is that you start at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We hope you enjoy this new way to explore through the impressive array of user photos in Street View!

Posted by Daniel Filip and Daniel Cotting, Computer Vision Team, Google Zürich

3D Buildings get smart

The 3D buildings in Google Earth are a great way to understand an area visually, and they just got better at conveying information about the place itself. Currently, you can click on model that was created by 3D modelers using tools like Google SketchUp and Google Building Maker to open a balloon.

Today, we've added two new sections to those balloons: Photos of nearby places and Nearby places.

Not only can you learn more about the place from the balloon, but you can also dig deeper by following the links. Want to see more nearby photos and places? What to learn about the Ferry Building listed as a nearby place? Click the links in the balloon to explore further.

Next time you're exploring a city with 3D buildings, watch for the familiar glow as you hover over a building, and give it a click. You might learn something new about the place.


Posted by Mark Limber, Product Manager

Mapping your data with Google Fusion Tables

Got a database full of cool data you want to show on a map? It just got easier.

Google Fusion Tables is a place in the cloud for your data tables. Today we're announcing some new features that will let you upload and map large amounts of geographic data. This used to require a developer, but now you can do it yourself. You can also now hide and show different data depending on your own criteria.

Here's a great example. Tom and Dirk at MTBGuru.com have a database of bike trails their users have submitted from around the world. Each bike trail includes hundreds or thousands of geographic points.

In a blog post today, MTBGuru.com describes their experiences using Google Fusion Tables to show all 5000 trails on one map, embedded directly on the site.

Zoom into an area and the actual paths of the trails become visible. Play around with the interactive map below, which shows data from MTBGuru. For starters, we're zoomed in to Prague, and not only can you see the trails, but each line is clickable.

Too many trails? Want to find trails long enough for a heart-pounding workout? Filter for trails longer than 70 kilometers and show just those on the map. It renders in seconds.

To try this for yourself, go to Tom and Dirk's live map. You can also read the MTBGuru.com blog to hear from .

In addition to filtering, aggregating, mapping points, lines, or polygons, and exporting to Google Earth, with Google Fusion Tables you can integrate different data sources, collaborate with others on columns, rows, and cells, and visualize your data in lots of other ways. If you want to connect your database to the Fusion Table map programatically like MTBGuru.com did, check out our API.

We hope you enjoy your newfound freedom to map and filter large data sets, and we'll continue to let you know about more cool new mapping features in Google Fusion Tables as they become available.

Posted by Hector Gonzalez & Rebecca Shapley, Google Fusion Tables team

Uploading your Picasa Web Albums pictures into Panoramio

Starting today, we are happy to announce that you can upload your pictures right from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio. By uploading your best photos of places into Panoramio you can share them with the Panoramio community and the world through Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Search, and more.

Panoramio is a community for hosting relevant photos about places, so every photo uploaded into Panoramio will be reviewed to ensure it meets the criteria to be included in Google Earth. We recommend you to check the Photo acceptance policy for Google Earth and Google Maps.

To upload photos from Picasa Web Albums, your photos need to be geo-tagged and in a public album. Eligible photos in Picasa Web Albums will display the "Upload to Panoramio" option below the Location map.

You'll need to log-in or create a Panoramio account to upload photos.

After uploading a photo to Panoramio, it will remain public as it was before in Picasa Web Albums. The process will create a second copy, so be aware that if you want to delete this photo in the future you will need to delete it from both Picasa Web albums and Panoramio.

We are looking forward to seeing your great pictures!

Posted by Roger Trias i Sanz, Panoramio Software Engineer