Google street view - The icon changes to a skier when viewing a piste. Try picking it up as well.
/via garethllew
Google street view - The icon changes to a skier when viewing a piste. Try picking it up as well.
/via garethllew
WDYL.com - When searching for a dirty word or phrase, instead of giving a safe-search error the website shows results for the word “kittens.”
/via Zachary Reese
Google Map Maker is a simple tool that lets you draw your own map and share that map with others. The Pulse view lets you see how people are making use of that tool in real-time. On top is the Google Earth view. On the bottom is a zoomed in view of the actual edit. Just press play, and see how people around the world are using Map Maker.
It's a simple map that is of the same likeness as the Zappos sales map and the even older Twittervision, but somehow it's still fun to peek in to see what people are doing.
[Google Map Maker via @johnmaeda]
Earlier this year, Google rolled out “Art Project,” a tool that lets you access 1,000 works of art appearing in 17 great museums across the world, from the Met in New York City to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (More on that here.) Now, as part of a broader effort to put art in your hands, the company has produced a new smartphone app (available in Android and iPhone) that enriches the museum-going experience, and it’s being demoed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The concept is pretty simple. You’re wandering through the Getty. You spot a painting that deeply touches you. To find out more about it, you open the Google Goggles app on your phone, snap a photo, and instantly download commentary from artists, curators, and conservators, or even a small image of the work itself. Sample this, and you’ll see what we mean. And, for more on the story, turn to Jori Finkel, the ace arts reporter for the LA Times.
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Art in “Augmented Reality” at The Getty Museum
A Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel
MoMA Puts Pollock, Rothko & de Kooning on Your iPad
Google App Enhances Museum Visits; Launched at the Getty is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at openculture.com, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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Attention, 3D fans: OpenGL in the browser has gradually gotten real. WebGL is a browser-friendly API for OpenGL graphics, and it’s pretty darned close to OpenGL ES 2.0, which in turn will be familiar to anyone doing modern mobile 3D development. WebGL isn’t part of HTML5, but HTML5 makes it possible: the Canvas element is what allows WebGL to work its magic. And WebGL goes nicely with technologies that are part of HTML5 or modern browser experiments, including the web audio API and browser video support. (The superb 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web has a 3D in the browser section, well worth reading.) And you can use JavaScript (among other modern languages) to code 3D creations.
If you love the idea of sharing 3D as easily as a webpage, this is big news. It’s a huge step forward from the clunky, unpredictable, confusing use of Java for browser OpenGL, and unlike that solution, it’s part of the page on which it’s delivered, not part of a plug-in or launched app.
In recent days, we’ve seen the first stable browser with WebGL enabled by default, Google Chrome. Right now, Chrome or Firefox 4 beta are likely the easiest and most stable way to test WebGL graphics. I’ve been testing Firefox 4 beta on Linux and more recently the stable Chrome on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it’s pretty fantastic.
Read Google’s announcement from Thursday, along with the other enhancements to Chrome:
A dash of speed, 3D and apps
Perhaps more exciting than the Chrome update is the superb Chrome Experiments, which recently added 3D goodness, from creative tools to eye candy to useful tools like an exploration of human anatomy:
WebGL Experiments
Grabbing the latest Chrome or installing Firefox beta will let you see them, but here are a couple of picks are a cool place to start, and have videos attached if you aren’t near a bleeding-edge browser:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/webgl-aquarium/?f=webgl”>WebGL Aquarium, Human Engines and Gregg Tavares
Field, Gregg Tavares
I’m pretty impressed with performance of experiments like the aquarium. I’m on a fairly low-end, last generation laptop with an NVIDIA 9500M, and they run easily.
WebGL is still early in development – Chrome is the first and only stable browser with support – but we’re getting to the phase when you could actually distribute stuff with it, and it could hit prime time very soon.
Which browsers support WebGL?
Chrome’s release is a very big deal. As I write this, WebGL is available in:
Opera plans support, but no public build is available yet.
Microsoft appears not to be planning support for IE9, meaning it’s most likely to be odd man out … again. But you can get support for WebGL inside IE using the free Chrome Frame plug-in.
Really, if you want to try this out, installing Chrome is a good idea. It’s also no accident that Google’s Chrome Web App store means people with interesting creations have an avenue for distribution, which should soon also be true with an open Mozilla-based store for Firefox et al.
Can you use Processing.js with WebGL?
Yes! Processing.js is actually a pretty decent way to fiddle around with it. The caveat is that WebGL support in Processing.js is a work in progress; if you want to get deeper, you’ll probably want to get into direct JavaScript control of WebGL. But that hasn’t stopped people from making some interesting hacks and work, and it’s a great place to start. Some demos –
A Processing.js Web IDE that uses WebGL:
– and a stunning music visualizer we’ve seen here before:
What about Google’s O3D?
O3D is some impressive technology and for many of us was the first truly compelling vision of 3D in a browser. The downside – it’s currently a plug-in. But Google does sometimes live up to their “open Web” hype. They’ve said they’re focused on improving WebGL, and that they’ll take the ideas from O3D (like its scene graph) and port to JavaScript and WebGL. There’s even an early version of the work.
It’s worth reading the (official Google) Chromium blog on the matter, partly to see how they’ve come around on JavaScript performance.
Why wouldn’t you use WebGL?
This is all compelling stuff, so let’s all abandon everything we’re doing and switch to WebGL — right? Well, not necessarily:
What’s surprising to me just writing that list is, while it appears long, the advantages of WebGL are still clear, and it makes sense that some of these differences will disappear. I imagine we will still need desktop software. Google, while characterized as some sort of browser-only religion, themselves continue adding native support in their Android platform, so presumably they understand game developers and other parties want that native OpenGL access. The question may not be whether WebGL “replaces” those tools, but whether people find smarter workflows and integrated higher-level APIs to work across the platforms.
Let’s sum it up this way: if you love 3D, and if you’re an OpenGL nerd, you’re in very happy times, indeed.
And regardless, you get to watch a cool jellyfish in Chrome any time you need to unwind.
http://www.khronos.org/webgl/
http://planet-webgl.org/
According to figures stated in the report, global tablet shipments reached 9.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010 with Apple continuing to dominate the tablet market with a 75% global share. Although impressive, Apple’s share slipped 20% from 95% in the third quarter, thanks largely to the apparent success of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab which sold over one million units in two months after it launched.
Despite warnings from Google that its Android operating system at the time wasn’t specifically tailored for large-screen tablet devices, manufacturers rushed their Android tablets to market in the fourth quarter, offering low cost devices aimed at capturing early-adopters and those without the budget for an Apple device.
Strategy Analytics expects Android to increase share in the first half of 2011, we tend to agree with them. At the recent CES event, a number of high-powered Android tablet devices were announced, most running Google’s new Android Honeycomb operating system, software that Google hopes will tempt many users away from Apple’s iOS-toting iPad.
Apple is expected to announce its next-generation iPad within the next couple of months, rumours suggesting it will become available in early Summer. We imagine Apple will record phenomenal sales of its new tablet but as the tablet market continues to expand, Android tablets will continue to provide significant competition for consumer hearts and wallets.Image Credit
Google recaps search trends for the year in Google Zeitgeist 2010, from the World Cup and the Olympics to the earthquake in Haiti and the BP oil spill. Above is relative search volumes around the world during the ash cloud in Iceland. You can browse the interactive map, or use the timeline to watch changes over significant events during the year.
A video (below) also accompanies the interactive, showing how the physical world and digital are melding ever so nicely.
Google Translate’s pronunciations may or may not impress you, but the thing’s got some beatboxing skills. Reddit user harrichr notes a fun result:
1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click “listen”
5) Be amazed
Does it count as beatboxing if the voice is non-human? (Okay, okay, yeah, you could do this on your own with just about anything by slicing off the plosives on words. But if you’re procrastinating on this Monday workday, it’ll seem utterly amazing. And don’t be surprised if Google takes over beatboxing, just like everything else. Thanks, vade!)
More variants: check out comments.
This is in no small part to the work both Typekit and Google have been doing. Today they both announced some very cool things in this area.
First up, Google announced that they are releasing high quality open source fonts in the Google Font Directory. Since these are open source you can even download the original font files yourself at the font code.google.com project.
Next, Google has made it very easy to include these fonts into your page using the new Google Font API. To use a font you simply drop some HTML into your page similar to the following, specifying the font you want to use:
body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }
Doesn't get simpler than that. The new API does alot of things for you behind the scenes:
Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.
These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.
On a related front, Typekit and Google announced a new Web Font Loader that smooths over many of the differences around loading web fonts on a page:
The WebFont Loader puts the developer in control of how web fonts are handled by various browsers. The API fires JavaScript events at certain points, for example when the web font completes downloading. With these events, developers can control how web fonts behave on a site so that they download consistently across all browsers. In addition, developers can set the fallback font's size to more closely match the web font, so content doesn't reflow after loading.
Furthermore, the WebFont Loader is designed to make it easy to switch between different providers of web fonts, including Google, Typekit, and others. The code is modular, and we expect to add modules for other major web font providers in coming weeks.
It's great to see Typekit involved in this; they are a real pioneer in this area and have helped make fonts on the web a reality.
To see all these pieces together navigate over to Smashing Magazine which relaunched their site using these technologies.
Congrats to the Google Web Fonts and Themes team, including Raph Levien, Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann, Marc Tobias Kunisch, Meslissa Louie, and David Kuettel.
[Disclosure: I work for Google and know the Web Fonts team. However, even if I didn't, I would still be excited about this since I've been waiting for web fonts to happen since the 90s!]
