Last month I wrote a post about KFC’s Mapvertised Logo in the Nevada Desert. But here’s another two great examples of Mapvertising on Google Earth; in Iquique, Chile and on Bondi Beach, Australia.
Coca-Cola Mapvertising This piece of Mapvertising was created by Coca-Cola for their 100 year anniversary in 1992. It’s made entirely of Coca Cola Bottles and was built to be visible from the road and to aircraft rather than satellites.
The 400ft wide mapvertised Coca Cola logo sits on the road to Iquique, Chile; one of Coca-Cola’s main bottling factories is South America.
This piece of Coca Cola Mapvertising is at -18.53 degrees latitude and -70.25 degrees longitude.
austalia.com Mapvertising This piece of mapvertising was written in the sand on Bondi Beach, Australia and was paid for my the Australian tourist board to promote australia.com.
This piece of australia.com Mapvertising is at -33.8913 degrees latitude and 151.2766 degrees longitude.
Rachel, Nevada is famous for being the UFO Capital of the World, a mecca for ufologists and space-nuts, located just of Just off the Extraterrestial Highway 375. Rachel’s also the closest town to Area 51 a mere 30 miles south (37.235454,-115.811262) of the giant KFC Colonel Logo.
This weekend I had a play around with Google Earth’s new API using it’s new browser plugin.
After some photoshopping and a lot of conversions (from pixels to metres to nautical miles to degrees of lat/long then divide by two), I managed to land a perfect scale replica of the Enterprise D at my local airport, London Gatwick.
Gatwick might be the world’s busiest single runway airport, but with the Enterprise on the tarmac, it made it look like a petrol station.
I did this by creating a transparent PNG of the Enterprise D and then mashing it into Google Earth as a ground overlay. The calculations were relatively simple. The hardest part was parking the Enterprise by nudging it in increments of about 100 metres. That about as precise as washing your finest crockery using a baseball bat.
Google’s Google Earth plugin is a bit shakey at the moment and is only available in Firefox and IE on Windows, but soon I’ll create a tutorial section showcasing a few of the things I’ve learnt.