Google Earth was released for Windows XP at the end of June last year. Playing around with the software, I created a few of the beginning stages of the 2005 Tour de France. The effort was quickly picked up by the Google Earth BBS community who completed the routes and improved upon my initial attempts.
This year, with plenty of time to spare, the stages for the 2006 Tour de France have been completed and it appears to be the work of Satan. Ha!
One noticeable difference between last year and this year is the addition of Google Earth for the Mac. That means—and I’m spitballing here—there’s potential for a lot more coverage of the virtual event due to the influence that Mac-using designer-developer-bloggers have on the blogosphere. I think this is a good thing. Money follows the news.
Here are some ways you can get involved in the Google Earth coverage of the 2006 event and help create a richer experience for everyone:
- Upload and geotag your event photos to Flickr (you can view geotagged photos in Google Earth by grabbing the kmz file from the GeoTagging Flickr group)
- Also, be sure to tag your photos with “tdf2006″
- Extend the Flickr photo proximity scripts by focusing on Tour de France photos (i.e., photos tagged “tdf2006″)
- What about pulling down geotagged videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and Google Video?
- Create a networked link that gets the current position of the pack, the teams, and the major riders
- Find a way to recreate the race using the above data so that historical replays can be preserved
- Are you involved with the Tour de France or one of the teams? Provide Google Earth data feeds from the race (race positions, times, current location, speed, etc.)
- And finally, spread the word! Do you want to see the technology get better (or cheaper)? Talk about it. Money follows the news.
Update: I just found a super simple method for geotagging photos in Flickr and it appears to work worldwide.
If you’re already working on stuff like this for this year’s TdF, please provide a link in the comments. And be sure to share your work with the Sports and Hobbies forum of the Google Earth BBS. Cheers!
how on earth did anyone find the TDF route this far out? I have worked for one of the world’s big intrernet sport sites and nobody ever gets info about the exact route like this.
The route information for each stage is published on the tour site.
Hi Chris,
Well as Harry said the core information is published of the site http://www.letour.fr.
That is basically a long list of cities, villages and road crossings. there is also an information on which road they are on. (Well all in French but thats how i grew up…)
Coordinates for this list of places are taken from a navigation programm, in this case Viamichelin.
This is the list you can find under the “Waypoints” folder in each stage.
The i use the driving directions from google earth to link the different places. So I do not even have to draw the track myself…
Finally i analyse the resulting track at http://www.gpsvisualizer.com to find out the length of the track.
So basically I use different resources to combine the available information. Some being only available recently (driving directions from GE and GPSvisualizer).
To refine the work I upgraded to GE-Plus to be able to edit the resulting track within GE for more confort.
Fantastic job!!! I am off to watch the last week of the Tour de France, this is the most comprehensive mapping I have managed to find. Thank you.
I will have my GPS so will try geotag the photos (need to find out what this means, and how to do it) and then upload them to Flickr.
Well done.
regards
Graham
Hi All Experts,
Does anyone use google earth images as ground image planes for use in aerial scenes. I know how to stitch them together but are there any tools or tricks to make sure that the images are at the same height, angle and such to make sure they stitch well. I know in the pro version you can get bigger images but im not going to pay for the pro version when i could stitch multiple images together…