Friday Fun With Google Maps

Wii Jogging with Street View
Someone buy me a Wii! I want this! A Japanese developer has managed to hack together Google street view with the Wii to create a jogging game. Check out the video below and if you are impressed you can download the code at Google Code.

Try to run on the google street view like a jogging game of wii fit from katsuma on Vimeo.

You can try Street View jogging with just your fingers here.

Moving to Mars?

Do you have plans to move planet? If so you might like to check out this modified map of Mars. As I understand it before the Large Hadron Collider broke last week it briefly created a black hole. The hole only existed for a couple of picoseconds, but just long enough for this website to travel back in time from the year 2208.

Modified Mars is a Google Map of Mars showing the planet after it has been terraformed.

Via: Google Earth Blog

Rent My Roof

This week a huge red letter 'r' the size of 10 football pitches has been unveiled at the site of the former Ravenscraig steelworks in Motherwell, Scotland. The artwork depicts Ravenscraig's corporate logo.

Murray Collins, of Capella Group, which is managing the Ravenscraig project, said: "The popularity of web-based satellite maps such as Google Earth has led to the growing phenomena of 'earth art' like the big 'r'."

Why not take advantage of the new advertising opportunities opened up by Google Maps? My roof is available at very reasonable rates.

Via: BBC

The World is in a Spin
Google Maps guru Mike Williams has produced a spinning Google Map using the Google Static Maps API. If you are interested in the development of Google Maps mash-ups Mike's Google Maps API Tutorials are one of the best places to start.

Google Tenth Birthday Timeline
Google have produced an interactive timeline of Google history for their tenth birthday. If you think that the idea seems familiar, you're right it is! Back in July the Google Lat Long team produced an interactive timeline with a map to celebrate the third birthday of the Google Maps API.

I prefer the Google Lat Long timeline, however the fact that they included all of the over 1500 posts that have appeared on Google Maps Mania in the timeline means that I'm more than a little biased.