Jaunted

Private Jets / Google Earth / Google Maps / Google / Weird Travel / → All Tags

Google Wants to Rebuild the World's Largest Airship Hangar. There's Only One Catch.

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.

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Google Maps / Google / Google Earth / Japan Travel / Technology / Maps / Tokyo Restaurants / → All Tags

Google Now Mapping the Inside of Japanese Businesses, Everything Else

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.

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Christmas Travel / Santa Claus / Google Maps / Google Earth / Holiday Travel / Around the World Travel / → All Tags

Follow Santa's Around-the-World Holiday Journey with NORAD's Santa Tracker

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.

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Google Earth / Google Ocean / Google / Technology / Green Travel / Ocean Travel / → All Tags

Google Earth Now Knows and Shows All About The Oceans

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.

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Google Earth / Google / Civil War Travel / Pennsylvania Travel / Tourism Boards / → All Tags

Tour Pennsylvania's Civil War Trails From Inside Google Earth

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.

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Airplanes / Google Earth / Travel Snapshots / → All Tags

Google Earth Zooms In On The US Military's Huge Aircraft Graveyard

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]

Google / Google Maps / Google Earth / Technology / Maps / → All Tags

Google Virtual Reality Chamber Closer To Being An Actual Thing

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:

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Google Earth / Maps / Travel Trends / → All Tags

Will Google Change The Way We Travel?

This month's Conde Nast Traveler has a fascinating backgrounder on Google Earth and Google Maps by Mike DiPaola. It turns out that the ability to visualize every part of an increasingly interconnected planet might have a few consequences for tourists:

So, will the new technology relegate paper maps and bound atlases to eBay and Antiques Roadshow? Since ancient times, maps have included only what was deemed important by the mapmaker, with scads of other stuff left on the cutting-room floor. Now all of it can be stored and accessed, and a map can be customized not just by a cartographer but by you. A map can never fully be the territory it purports to represent, but as layer upon layer of information becomes available, the screen inches ever closer to reality.

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Lost Cities / Adventure Travel / Google Ocean / Google Earth / Atlantis / → All Tags

Google Says Mysterious Grid is Scanning Error, Not Atlantis

Dream on: After a U.K. tabloid boasted it found the mythical lost city of Atlantis on the souped-up Google Ocean, the non-evil giant was forced to issue a statement declaring that the city is, in fact, not real.

According to Plato, the island kingdom of Atlantis was a major naval power before sinking overnight. According to aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford, the ruins of Atlantis are located at 31 15'15.53N, 24 15'30.53W in Google Ocean -- unless it's some nefarious plan of the supposedly non-evil corporation to drive conspiracy theorists crazy.

Google counters that the strange patterns Bamford spotted are just a by-product of their scanning system, like the shots of nudists or porn-store-visitors captured by their roving cameras. But hey, that's no fun! Who wants to believe that?

Related Stories:
· Google dismisses "Atlantis" find [BBC News]
· Has Google Ocean Found the Missing City of Atlantis? [Jaunted]

Lost Cities / Adventure Travel / Google Ocean / Google Earth / Atlantis / → All Tags

Has Google Ocean Found the Missing City of Atlantis?

According to a British aeronautical engineer, Google Ocean, an extension of Google Earth, has found what many humans could not: the lost city of Atlantis. A near-perfect rectangular grid has shown up about 620 miles off the coast of northwest Africa, near the Canary Islands and it looks like it's on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

For real Google Ocean nerds who want to look for themselves the coordinates are: 31 15'15.53N 24 15'30.53W.

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Google Earth / India Travel / Security / → All Tags

After Mumbai, Will India Ban Google Earth?

Google Earth, the magical software that makes real life more like Second Life, may have been used in the planning of the recent terrorist assault on Mumbai, says a lawyer who has filed suit in the Bombay High Court. He's hoping that the Indian government will order a "complete ban on Google Earth and similar sites like Wikimapia" in the interest of national security.

Indian officials have previously expressed concerns about security and mapping software, as in 2006 when then-President Abdul Kalam warned about Google Earth and its utility to terrorists. The search giant agreed in 2007 to blur out some imagery that India deemed sensitive, but that clearly didn't include tourist-friendly venues in the heart of Mumbai.

To us, this is a case of "guns don't kill people, people do." Even the areas worldwide already blurred out by Google are listed on the internet, and making photos of "sensitive" facilities--whatever that means--difficult to obtain doesn't eliminate threats. But the band of terrorists in Mumbai wasn't looking to take out a secret military installation; their goals were massive chaos, a high body count and as much media exposure as possible.

As to whether an eventual ban on Google Earth will help stem violence in India, a company spokesman tells The Telegraph:

Tools such as Google Earth are built from information that is already available from both commercial and public sources, and it is important to remember that the same information is available to anyone who purchases imagery from those public sources.

Related Stories:
· Complete Ban on Google Earth Sought [Times of India]
· Surveying Mumbai After the Terror Siege [Jaunted]

[Photo of the Bombay High Court: Google Earth]

Tourism Boards / Tourism Board Travel / Google Earth / Travel Tech / → All Tags

Google Earth Travel: South Africa Tourism Goes Virtual

Google Earth seems to get more useful by the day, and now you can plan more than just your next pool party using the free software.

South African Tourism worked with Google to develop a special batch of layers to hype the country. You can fly in over cultural sites and historic landmarks or click over to the nature and safari info to plan a wildlife-focused trip.

And of course all the locations for the 2010 World Cup are highlighted as well. Speaking of, tickets for the competition go on sale in February 2009, about the time, we'd expect, you'll start seeing a huge amount of press about visiting South Africa.

Related Stories:
· Sightseeing in South Africa [Google LatLong]
· Tourism Board Travel coverage [Jaunted]
· Google Earth coverage [Jaunted]