Google Earth now shows the City of Nanaimo in beautiful 10cm colour.

With our last ortho project, the City ensured that we could provide the images to consumer-oriented providers like Google. We did this for two reasons. First, it would allow local residents, businesses, and educators to benefit from the higher resolution imagery in Google Earth and Maps (eventually). Second, now that our GIS applications support KML output, staff can use Google Earth Pro to visualise and communicate more effectively. In particular, they are able to easily create movies that tell a story in three dimensions.

I’m impressed by the fidelity of the images in Google Earth. If you compare them with our CityMap site (IE/Windows only. Sorry – I’m working on it…), they are actually somewhat cleaner, though there may be some smoothing. The compression format we are using introduces some artefacts.

Nanaimo City Hall in CityMap:

Nanaimo City Hall in Google Earth:

This update gives me a stronger platform (and incentive) for providing additional services to our residents, such as interactive KML layers and GeoRSS feeds.

Thanks to the other Michael Jones (data acquisition, not CTO) at Google for working with me to get these images loaded. I heard a funny story from a colleague about a business card mix-up that resulted in him waking up the CTO in India at 4am to talk about data provision. Apparently he was quite nice, despite the confusion :)

If anyone else sees the same value in providing their orthos to Google as I do, please get in touch with me and I’ll pass along the correct Michael’s contact info.

-J