Gaiagi Driver - Updates 2009

New features added recently:

• Sightseeing Tours: you can select a sightseeing tour from a predefined list of tours like "New York: Central Park to Time Square", "San Francisco: Market Street to Golden Gate", "Rome: Collosseum to Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II", .... Tours can also be saved via a link and shared with others.
• Select your car: Gaiagi Driver now offers to select your car. You can e.g. drive a Porsche, US Police Car, ... and even a UK Bus. Modells are from the Google 3D warehouse and created by Antics and others. Please check the config section for details. If there is interest we can offer to select your own car in "kmz"-format via an URL specified.
• Radio: You can turn on the radio in the config section. Every car needs a radio ...

Gaiagi Driver is available at http://www.gaiagi.com/3d-driving-simulator/.

Gaiagi Driver - Driving Simulator including Streetview and Birdsview

The driving simulator follows the path created by the directions and shows the present position in different views. Following views are available:

• upper left: Google Earth view
• upper right: Google Map view. You can toggle traffic information as well as street view information as overlays.
• lower left: Google Streetview
• lower right: Microsoft Birdsview

Other features include navigation in the Google Earth or Google Maps view while other views are adjusted accordingly, controlling of road overlay in earth view, buildings overlay in earth view, traffic overlay in maps view etc. You can easily share the current view with others.

Test drive Gaiagi Driver (Google Earth plugin required; you will be asked to install it if you have not done so).

US Weather Radar Gadget Updates 2008

New features added recently:

• 1 click weather: just click on the map to get local weather information
• IR Clouds: Clouds overlay based on infrared satellite images as part of the Radar tab
  
• Wind Movie: 6 day wind flow forecast from meteoblue.com
• May 29: Added Google Earth Plugin support which is yet experimental as it does not support all of the functionality offered by Google Maps like changing the height of the Gadget or supporting overlays the same way as Google Maps does. Update: To test the present functionality you can enable the GE Plugin in the configuration settings.
• July 11: The gadget now supports opacity control of the cloud overlay as well.
• August 23: If no ZIP is configured the weather is shown for your local geographic location derived from the IP address. An additional configuration parameter enables to automatically center the map on the geographic location.
  If you are travelling this lets you always view the weather information for your local area as well as optionally have the map centered on your present location.
• October 18: support for canvas view in iGoogle
  

More about NEXRAD - the Doppler Weather Radar detecting present rainfall

Part of the information shown by the Weather Radar Module are NEXRAD weather radar echo graphics. Here you can find more information about the radar technology and meaning of the colors in the radar overlays:

• http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/doppler/baserefl.htm#rainrate
• http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/doppler/radarfaq.htm#RF
  

Gaiagi Photo Explorer

The Gaiagi Photo Explorer shows photos from flickr and Panoramio tagged with geo locations on Google Maps. It has a convenient interface to zoom into locations of photos as well as links to the original photo pages at the photo services.

You can move from one photo to the next easily and load new photos for the map area selected. Local search from Google enables to easily select a new location and display a brand new set of photos.


Please let us know your comments and suggestion how to improve the service.

US Weather Radar Gadget Update

The new update includes:

• Instant weather forecast via insert with icons. Hover over the icons to get a detailed forecast
• Stored locations of the weather forecast inserts as well as map location and zoom
• Options to scale the size of the content of the weather forecast insert
• Option to show the timestamp of the last update of the Radar overlay
• Options to hide the inserts

Update: We also added:

• Live Weather cams in the area around the selected ZIP code. Not every weather station has its own webcam.
• Video weather forecast (Vidcast) from Weatherbug.com.
• Option to change the weather station. With the Chg button next to the weather station name in the insert the weather stations in the area are displayed on the map. Clicking on a weather station selects the new weather station and saves it for future.
• Fixed: The map did not recenter to the stored location for modules with a height greater 200. This is fixed now.
• Display of earthquakes from the last 24 hours. The default is to hide earthquakes below magnitude 5.0 so the display does not get cluttered.
• Optional display of traffic status for selected cities. Default is not to show the traffic overlay so display stays uncluttered.
• Support for KML and GeoRSS-Overlays is now also available. KML-Collections can be found at e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language. FYI: right now sometimes image overlays don't work.
  You can specify an overlay by the link to e.g.
  
• NWS Weather Warnings
  http://wdssii.nssl.noaa.gov/geotiff_new/nws_warnings.kmz
  
• Hurricane live positions
  http://www.glooton.fr/hurricanes.kmz
• Flights approaching different airports: http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geSFO.kmz (San Francisco)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geBOS.kmz (Boston)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geJFK.kmz (JFK - New York)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geLAX.kmz (Los Angeles)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geATL.kmz (Atlanta)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geORD.kmz (Chicago)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geSEA.kmz (Seattle)
  http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/geMIA.kmz (Miami)
  
• Option to change the location of the weather forecast. Click on the "ZIP" link or on one of the forecast icons in the weather forecast overview. Enter a location or ZIP in the field and hit "enter" to change to the new location displaying the new weather forecast and weather station
  

"MyView" had to be removed because of traffic

Because of the high traffic generated by the "MyView" on the NRLSSC server the feature showing different views like IR Satellite, Wind, ... had to be removed. We are searching for an alternative. If you know of alternative sources please send us an email.