We never have enough time or space to get to all the Google Travel news that we'd like. A few weeks ago we talked about their new airport maps, and a little before that we did an introduction to their burgeoning flight search service. Unfortunately Google Flight Search got dragged down by how the airline industry does business, and it has remained unimpressive.

On the other side of the success spectrum, though, developers and programmers expanded Google Earth to include games—a move that involved airlines and has implications for social media—and an MIT student playing around with Google Maps made a de facto travel itinerary checker.

But this post isn't about any of those stories. This post is about deep, abiding, biting, bitter jealousy.]]> Omri 2011-12-12T11:40:56-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/5/16/135949/005

Google continues to make progress on their project of enabling you to see the world without ever leaving your house (sadly, not totally a joke). The company is adding more and more information to Google Maps, this time encouraging Japanese businesses to upload panoramic images of their stores to Google's Business Photos database, which is hooked into Google Places, which of course is embedded in Google Maps. The Japanese focus is part of a broader roll out, with Business Photos accepting images from US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The upshot is that, metaphorically but not really, you'll soon be able to navigate your way "inside" restaurants and shops digitally on Google Maps. Just like with other photos in the application, users will be able to pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D panoramic images of business. CNN's hyperlocal Asia travel site CNNGo, showing an admirable awareness of cultural sensibilities, mused that the feature will especially appeal to their "more shy" Japanese readers. We imagine that users elsewhere will find plenty of other uses, above and beyond the wow factor.]]> Omri 2011-05-16T16:02:07-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/12/24/9829/6205

Well, everyone; today is the day. It's the day we can begin "tracking" Santa Claus on his gift-giving journey around the world via NORAD's annual Santa Tracker. There once were days when NORAD, or the North American Aerospace Defense Command, would just send little Santa travel status update videos to the networks, for them to broadcast during newscasts, but these days things are tad more hi-tech than all that. Santa is being tracked by Google Maps.

Over at the official Santa Tracking website—which is a cute site to let your kids check every so often during Christmas Eve—you can watch grass grow watch as Santa slowly (or pretty quickly, really) makes his way around the world, spending no more than 4 minutes in one place. He's already finished with the Pacific Islands (he got to visit Palau a moment ago), New Zealand, Australia and—from what it looks like—North Korea. As we type this, his butt is getting stuck in some minimalist chimneys around Japan, as he's still got quite a while before he hits North America airspace. ]]> JetSetCD 2010-12-24T09:34:27-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/4/23/121721/608

If Google's corporate mission is to organize all the information in the universe, then apparently the task for Google Earth is to map and tag the universe itself. All of it. In the recent past, Google engineers have gone beyond mere, ordinary continents and mapped both outer space and the planet's oceans. Until this month, though, the default installation of Google Earth mostly had you zooming aimlessly around the seas. While this setup was fun and occasionally led to some comedy, at the beginning Google Ocean just didn't have the layers and layers of information that are attached to landmasses.

Google spent the last year working to change all that, and today we now have hundreds of informational placemarks spread across 20 layers. There's also a specific Ocean layer, created in large part with the help of Sylvia Earle’s Mission Blue Foundation, that alone has hundreds of posts. As of this month that layer has reached critical mass, and from now on will be included by default in Google Earth. ]]> Omri 2010-04-23T16:04:41-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/4/2/154323/9483

If you've ever wanted to tour Pennsylvania's historic Civil War sites but can't imagine navigating the perennially-unfinished death trap that is the Turnpike, we've got good news! A new project spearheaded by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office aims to deliver the state's Civil War Trails right to your desktop, blending Google Earth technology, historical information, and incredible high-def GigaPan panoramic photos. The images are so detailed that you can literally zoom in on gravestone inscriptions, to say nothing of the centuries-old houses and towns that users are able to navigate.

The project—a collaborative effort mixing the talents of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth, Google, Carnegie Mellon, NASA, and the National Civil War Museum—aims both to educate the public and to promote Pennsylvania's many historical tourist destinations. It's part of the state's broader Civil War Trails site, which catalogs everything Civil War-esque that has to do with Pennsylvania.]]> Omri 2010-04-02T17:05:16-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/3/1/141150/0445

There's a very cool story dug up by Gizmodo recently, that Google Earth now provides an eagle-eyed view of an aircraft boneyard for the US military. We dream of visiting an airplane boneyard, but for now—this might be as close as we can get. Here's what they have to say about its awesomeness:

The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG), also known as the Boneyard, is a four square mile site in Arizona housing 4,000 retired aircraft—or at least one of almost every US armed forces plane since WWII.

And don't think that they are just rusting out there. Salvaged parts come from this place like nobody's business, helping to recycle what's left and regain some money. Sadly, there are no guided tours of the site. But there is this huge BBC image of it for us to drool over in the meantime.

Related Stories:
· Google Earth's View of the Boneyard, Where Planes Go To Die [Gizmodo]
· Google Earth Reveals US Military's Biggest Plane Graveyard [Treehugger]
· Airplanes [Jaunted]

[Photo: Google Earth, Treehugger] ]]> JetSetCD 2010-03-01T14:24:47-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/2/12/134353/701

A couple weeks ago we wrote up the new Google Maps Street View images for the San Diego Zoo. Definitely neat. It's hard to see, though, how those images could ever be transformed into anything "realistic." Ditto for the new Street View images that Google just posted for some of the world's better ski slopes and Winter Games arenas. They're eye-catching, and it's cool that they were able to mount their GPS-enabled camera on top of a snowmobile, but everything still has the feel of a standard picture gallery.

But take all of that Street View stuff, mix it with some Google Earth technology, and bake the combination into a full-blown virtual reality chamber - that's a different story. And that's what Google engineers have been doing with their Liquid Galaxy project, a kind of gazebo that they've been showing off at tech conventions. An upgraded version just made an appearance at the TED conference. Via Mashable, it does kind of look mind-blowing doesn't it:]]> Omri 2010-02-12T16:05:16-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/