Add "contrast" to your Real Indoor experience

The new feature of Real Indoor allows to change the contrast of the Streetview images "on the fly". This gives a major enhancement to the spinning experience in Real Indoor.

Many Streetview images have low contrast. Now you can control the contrast of the images in the settings of Real Indoor and tune it to your desired value.

Normal Streetview image from the Col de Tourmalet (Stage 16 of Tour de France 2012):

Contrast enhanced Streetview image from the same location:

This feature works only in Chrome for now and requires to start Chrome with the option "--disable-web-security" - which you should only do for this individual Chrome instance. All other Chrome instances have to be stopped in advance. Because of the reduced security you should not browse other webpages with this setting.

Technical background: the contrast is calculated in the canvas where the Streetview images are loaded into. As the images come from a different site web security settings do not allow access to the image content which is why the web security settings have to be changed to allow the image manipulation.

Real Indoor: Tour de France 2012 with all stages

The new update of Real Indoor includes all stages from the Tour de France 2012 Race Route in July 2012.

The Tour de France 2012 consists of 20 stages starting with a prologue in Liege/Belgium.

One impression from this years Tour de France in Real Indoor:



If you want to ride one of the Tour de France stages direct your browser to realindoor.com and select "Advanced" when creating a tour. You will find the Tour de France race as first entry in the pull-down:

US Weather Radar and iGoogle end of life

We are getting several questions about what happens to the US Weather Radar gadget on iGoogle when iGoogle goes end of life in about a year.

We have started a discussion at http://usweatherradar.uservoice.com/ about the migration of the US Weather Radar gadget functionality to a webpage.


The idea is a (small) webpage which can be potentially opened as separate window which has the similar functionality like the iGoogle US Weather Radar (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=gmapsflighttracker.com/weather/radar/weather-radar.xml).

This way the US Weather Radar could be seen from every browser on desktop as well as on mobile phones.

What do you think? Head over to http://usweatherradar.uservoice.com/ and let us know. We are happy to hear about your ideas!

Real Indoor: Paris-Nice 2012 Race Route with all stages

The new update of Real Indoor includes all stages from the Paris-Nice 2012 Race Route in March 2012.

The race consists of 8 stages starting with a time trial near Paris. Further stages cross the country to the south-east into the mountains until decending to the Nice. The last stage is a 9km climb from Nice to the Col d'Èze.

One impression from stage 6 Suze-la-Rousse > Sisteron:

More mountain stages from Tour de France

Real Indoor got some more predefined mountain stages from Tour de France 2011 - 2013:

• Tour de France 2011 Etape 19: From Modane Valfrejus to Alpe-d'Huez 
• Tour de France 2012 Etape 11: Albertville to La Toussuire
• Tour de France 2013 Etape 2: Corsica: Bastia to Ajaccio

Climb that hills like the pros ;-)

Real Indoor now supports waypoints - enhances realistic workout!

A feature which has been requested by many is to be able to specify multiple waypoints for the route. This e.g. is interesting in cases where the directions given by Google do not fit the needs and travel a different route than the intended one.

Waypoints now have been added to Real Indoor and can be found in the directions interface:

"Let it snow" - on your webpage

Googles latest easter egg:  If you search for "let it snow" your screen will become foggy from all the snow coming down.


Here is an explanation how to use the slightly modified javascript to have it snow on your webpage as well. The following code goes into your html-file - best at the end of your content before the "</body>" tag :

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi?key=INSERT-YOUR-KEY"></script>

<div id="gbqfb" style="z-index: 1000;"></div>

<div id="snfloader" style="visibility: hidden;"></div>
<script id="snfloader_script" type="text/javascript">
(function(){
var s=document.createElement('script');
s.src='snfog.js'; s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async=true;
s.addEventListener('load',function(){console.log("snow loaded");
var app = new goog.egg.snowyfog.Snowyfog();app.init();},false);
document.getElementById('snfloader').appendChild(s);})();</script>

The snowyfog-mod.js (you can just save it with right click from here) goes into the same directory as your html file.

Update: You need to include the Google JS api to have the "google"-environment available. Please add your API-key which you can get in the Google API-Console. The script tag should be added in the head section:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi?key=INSERT-YOUR-KEY"></script>

Here is the example page with minimal requirements: Let it snow!

When opening your page it will slowly go foggy. After a while a button called "Defrost" will appear and all the fog will be removed after clicking. Snowflakes will continue to fall. Try it out.

Here is an example: 

New Simulator "Real Indoor" with Physics Engine

What is Real Indoor? 

Based on the successful Gaiagi Driver we have pushed the limits of online driving simulation to create Real Indoor.


Real Indoor is dedicated to create a realistic biking experience while working out on spin bikes or similar devices.


Streetview panoramas and the physics engine provide feedback which simulate driving on a real track.


Tracks from bicycle directions, GPS recordings or just following Streetview panoramas allow for a whole new experience while working out and seeing the Earth.


Use Real Indoor to prepare yourselve for that bike summer trip into the mountains - slopes, physics and views all realistically simulated.


Predefined tracks offer a jump start into working out in the real world:

Enjoy the Earth with Real Indoor and have fun biking!

Gaiagi Driver - Updates 2011

New features added recently to the Gaiagi Driver:

• The car speed can manually controlled via a slider
• Condense controls into a small driving control in the upper left where you can pause, stop, continue driving; also the speed is displayed in the control
• Physics mode: to support indoor biking/spinning bikes a bike has been added which moves with real speed based on the applied power. You can control the power you want to spend on your bike and the driver will move accordingly based on weight, slope of the track, ...
• New vehicles added: Motorhome, Camper, Ferrari, Porsche, Ducati, BMX bike, Woman with bike, Millenium Falcon ;-)
• Configurable Icon which displays the location on the map
• Show Panoramio Pictures instead of Birds View in the lower right
• Saving own tours: You can create a tour and store this on your computer to later load the tour again
• Support for speech input on Chrome browsers
• Draggable start and end points. Just adapt your route by dragging the start and end points on the Google Map. 

The Gaiagi Driver is here: http://www.gaiagi.com/driving-simulator/.

Gaiagi Driver - Updates 2010

New features added recently to the Gaiagi Driver:

• Text-to-speech of directions: if you are using Google Chrome you can enable the driver to read the next leg of the directions - just click on the loudspeaker icon appearing in the upper right of the directions to enable reading the directions
• House value Zestimate: when panning the Google Earth view or the Google Map the Location information will show you a "Zestimate link". This will retrieve Zillow.com house values and display in a separate window.
• The location information will as well show the option to retrieve incident data for the present viewport of the Google Map. This feature is leveraging a service from mapquest .

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

US Weather Radar Gadget - Issue with centering on Kansas

Due to an incompatible change in the geocoding API of Google we are facing difficulties with mapping ZIP-codes to geo-coordinates. A fix was introduced which should be active in the latest Us Weather Radar Gadget.

Some instances might have cached the Weather Radar gadget. Helpful is the following gadget from Google which enables you to control caching behaviour of gadgets:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/developer.xml

Please let us know if you still have issues after turning off caching of the gadget. If it is working for you you can turn off caching again.

Update Oct. 20th: The issue with the Google geocoder is still not solved. We did further modifications to the geocoding process using 3 different geocoder now and will track results and issues. For us it is working so we need feedback if you have trouble even after turning off caching.

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.

US Weather gadget update

We updated the US weather gadget for Google home pages. New features are

• You can choose among many different overlays when selecting the "MyView" tab (e.g. IR Satellite, VIS Satellite, ice, snow and snow warning, 24h precipiation, ...)
  
• height of the module is now configurable
• minimize the weather station - click on the small arrow in the upper left corner
• zooming by double-click (left zooms in, right zooms out)
  

Please let us know if there is a feature which you would like to see.

Update: 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.

Weather Module: present weather conditions as insert

Now the Weather Module features additional content by WeatherBug: Present weather conditions in two presentations.

Selecting a ZIP for local weather will also trigger the display of a insert showing present weather conditions. Clicking the Station ID will show a larger weather info. You can close this again by hitting the "close" link at the top of the insert.

You can see the new version active further below this page in a sample of the standalone Google Gadget feature.

Comments:

• Changing the station is not supported until now - will be in the next release. Right now the station is defaulted from the ZIP entered.
• You can drag the weatherbug window (at the white areas) to the place you want it to be. This also the case e.g. for the weather forecast.