Too cheap to take your kids on a vacation to Orlando to see Disney World? Now you can just load up Google Earth instead.
This morning, users of the software mapping tool will find a brand new layer that features an experience Bruce Polderman, Google Earth's product manager, says "pushed the user experience of both 3D models and KML to new heights." The layer has the entire theme park modeled in 3D, right down to some of the tiniest details like trees, food carts, and even park maps the size of a stop sign.
Not everything in the park is modeled in 3D, but according to Polderman there are well over 5,000 objects that have made their way in there. Not featured in 3D are the spanning parking lots, which are actually larger than the entire park when viewed from above.
Also included is a wash of data for each attraction. To find out more about any part of the park, there's a little purple Mickey Mouse head you can click on that will give you a written description of the ride, along with photos and, in some cases, even videos. Some descriptions are a little more kid-oriented, with music and special effects like Cinderella Castle, which sparkles when you roll your mouse over it. There are also links on each ride to help you book a vacation, or jump you to a special page in Google Earth's built-in Web browser.
To see the new layer in 3D you'll need the latest version of Google Earth. I'm expecting this to make its way over to Google Maps in a few weeks with that new browser plug-in.
Explore all the nooks and crannies of Disney World with Google Earth's new layer--right down to the rides.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data.
KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth, the company's software for flying over the surface of a virtual globe. With its 3D coordinate-based system, people can create models of city buildings, draw a line showing where they hiked, or overlay their own custom place names on a generic map.
Google hopes standardizing KML will help mean broader use for the map description language, but already, even rivals such as Microsoft have embraced it. This view shows Microsoft's Live Maps with a KML overly describing Glenn Canyon National Recreation Area.
(Credit: Microsoft)Google already shared its KML format openly, and others had used it in software products, but Google now hopes that its status as an official standard will decrease barriers to further adoption.
"What OGC brings to the table is...everyone has confidence we won't take advantage of the format or change it in a way that will harm anyone," said Michael Weiss-Malik, Google's KML product manager. "The goal is to prevent market fragmentation," in which different technology uses different standards.
File formats may sound mundane, but they can give strategic value to those who control them as a gateway to the data held by people and companies. In one high-profile example, open-source allies launched an attack on Microsoft's Office stronghold with the OpenOffice.org software, which could mostly read Microsoft's file formats.
One front in that war was an effort to set OpenOffice's file formats as an industry standard called ODF (OpenDocument Format), a move Microsoft countered with its own OOMXL effort, which Google opposed.
It didn't seem like there was powerful reluctance to use KML. For example, the latest Virtual Earth and Live Maps technology from Google rival Microsoft can use KML to let users export user information to navigation devices. And the Microsoft site can overlay KML files from the Internet onto its Live Maps--here's a (slow-loading) link to one from the National Resources Defense Council that describes expected effects from global warming to various national parks, along with the park boundaries.
But standardization will make KML more palatable, Weiss-Malik said. "Governments like to say they can publish to OGC KML instead of Google KML," he said.
And he expects to see a new era blossom of personal map publishing, all powered by KML. "We're just starting to see the birth of map publishing," he said.
KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language. It initially was developed by Keyhole, the satellite imagery company Google acquired in 2004. Keyhole's technology was built into the Google Maps site and the Google Earth software.
The standard, which geographic information system (GIS) software specialist Galdos Systems helped bring to the standardization process, is based on KML 2.2. The official KML standard can be downloaded from the OGC Web site.
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