Through the Secret Door of Street View

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The Secret Door is a new and impressively designed Street View portal, that can magically transport you around the world using Google Map's interactive panoramic imagery.

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about The Secret Door and there are already a number of well established sites that allow the user to explore a series of random Street Views. However the Secret Door does have a couple of very nice touches. I really like the background music and in particular the sound effect that is used when you are transported to a new Street View.


My favourite Google Maps Street View slide-show remains MapCrunch.

Like The Secret Door MapCrunch allows you to view a series of random Street Views. However MapCrunch includes the option to narrow the Street Views shown by location and by type of view. You can select to see just urban views, indoor Street Views and to define the time delay before a new Street View is shown.

MapCrunch also includes a View of the Day gallery. The gallery is a great collection of some of the best Street Views found on Google Maps.

Washington DC's Public Art Map

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ArtAround is a Google Map of public art in Washington DC.

The ArtAround map allows the user to search by type of art (murals, statues, street art, museums, etc.) and by location. The map also displays current events and festivals and public art venues. Another interesting feature of the map is the ability to filter the results by date.

A slider control beneath the map allows the user to select dates from a time-line which updates the map to show the relevant results. The slider control is a really useful tool for anyone interested in Washington DC's art history.

America's Gardens on Google Maps

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Find a Garden is one woman's mission to map and visit America's flower gardens. What started out as a personal project to create a map that would be useful in planning garden visits has now become a handy resource for anyone interested in flowers and horticulture.

The map shows the locations of all types of gardens, from small park rose gardens to state botanical gardens. Each of the gardens includes a link to the garden's website and the gardens that are indicated with a tick include the map creator's own photographs and ratings of the garden.

The Wonderful Worlds of Minecraft

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TopoMC is busy recreating the map of the United States using the online block building game of Minecraft.

A number of American cities and regions have already been mapped using Minecraft and data from the U.S. Geological Survey. TopoMC uses the National Elevation Dataset and the National Land Cover Dataset to automatically generate Minecraft maps of cities and regions.

The TopoMC website includes links to download the already created world files into Minecraft or to view the cities and regions in Google Maps. The screenshot above shows the Google Map of New York City recreated in Minecraft using TopoMC.

Also See

Westocraft Mincraft Map - the fictional world from A Song of Ice and Fire
Crafting Azeroth - the World of Warcraft map in Minecraft

The Google Maps Bar Crawl Planner

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The City Swig is a handy guide to the best bar specials, beer prices, and liquor prices in Richmond, Virginia.

If you are heading out for a night on the town then you can use The City Swig to find the best possible route taking in the cheapest beer or liquor. The route planner lets you choose the day of the week and the area of Virginia that you wish to visit and then produces a handy Google Map showing the bars and stores offering the best deals.

How Big is Google Maps?

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Recently the Google Maps API added the option to allow polygon shapes on Google Maps to be set to draggable. If the polygon property is set to true, the user can then drag the shape over the map.

Google created a popular game, they called Mercator Puzzle, to demo the new draggable polygon option. The game set the geodesic property of the polygons to true, which means the game provides a great insight into the Mercator projection. It is very noticeable in the game how the polygons resize as you drag north and south on the map.

How big is Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania? also makes use of draggable polygons with the geodesic property of the polygons set to true. In this case it allows the user to drag a polygon of Lake Tanganyika around on Google Maps and see how it compares in size when placed over other locations.

The app comes with all the code so you can create your own example using shape files of other locations. The effect is very similar to (and is even called a 'customisable mimic' of) the BBC's Dimensions project How Big Really?.

The BBC Dimensions projects allows you to move polygons of important places and events around on Google Maps and overlay them on other locations to help give you a sense of scale of these locations.

Extreme Weather on Google Maps

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From the major flooding in Australia to Hurricane Sandy in the US 2012 seems to have been a year when much of the world was effected by extremes of weather of some sort or another.

CBC News in Canada has created a time-line of 2012 that maps occurrences of extreme weather and the natural disasters that struck during the last year. The Extreme Weather and Natural Disasters Map uses the Google Maps API with the Simile Time-line library.

The time-line is located beneath the map and can be controlled by dragging with your mouse left to right. As you scan through the year on the time-line the map markers are adjusted on the map to show the extreme weather and natural disasters that occurred during those dates. 

The markers are colour-coded to indicate the type of weather or natural disaster recorded and you can click on any of the markers to read more about each incident. Each incident also includes a link to click-through and read the CBC News report about the extreme weather or natural disaster.