Virtual Africa

The new Google Earth plug-in allows you to view 3D Google Earth imagery in your browser.

It’s the most impressive and most important geo-immersive imaging development of the year and we’ve been able to make it work with the Virtual Africa interactive 360 degree images.

Let me translate that for those who don’t know what a plug-in is: There is a new piece of software that allows you to see 3-dimensional Google satellite maps on a website without even having to download Google Earth and it’s the coolest thing you’ll see all year.

Now that everyone knows what we’re talking about, a few notes about the plug-in:

• Surely the most important feature is that it works seamlessly with current Google Maps files. As you will see in this example, you simply click on “Earth”, install the plug-in and go for it.

• We’ve picked up one or two re-positioning glitched when we embed some of the Virtual Africa interactive pictures, but this is an irregular use and even these are solvable if you have enough time.

• Unfortunately the plug-in is currently only available for Windows-based machines – which is bad news for Mac users like myself. The good news is that it works without problem on Parallels and Boot Camp as you would expect.

After playing with this plug-in for the last few weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is one of the most important developments in both mapping, visualization and search in a long time.

It lowers the barrier of entry to one of the best positioned geographical displays available and will have a huge effect on the popularity and use of Google Earth.

The fact that you won’t have to open the application, will make a bigger impact than people might think.

When you find this post in a dozen months or so from now and it seems obvious that everyone from real estate companies, educational and tourism organization is embedding this into their websites – well, we told you so……..

Have a look at the map we created for our previous post about Bazaruto Archipelago to see the coolness for yourself.

The map of the Hemel-en-Aarde wine valley we created for Die Burger works just as well and you can view it here.

We’re very interested to hear your comments on this ………

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