What if someone were to create a map that showed every street in the country and nothing else? Fathom Information Design did just that, and the results are amazing!

It feels kind of like the city lights of Earth that we recently wrote about, as you can clearly see cities form without any kind of borders or other overlays in there.

What's even more remarkable about the "All Streets" map is how clearly the mountain ranges are defined. Simply by drawing in the roads, you can see them without any difficulty. A great example is the Appalachian Mountains, seen here:

You can view and/or purchase the map over on the Fathom website.

(via +Adrienne St. Aubin)

To celebrate the three year anniversary of the release of the 3D Ocean in Google Earth, they've just released a major update to their bathymetry (underwater terrain) and it looks great!

Similar to their recent update "Pretty Earth" update, this one does quite a lot to help clean up stray artifacts and images visible in the ocean. A great example of that is Guam, seen here alongside the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the world:

Another noteworthy change is that "Atlantis" is now gone. A few years ago some people thought they had found the lost city of Atlantis, but it turned out to simply be sonar tracks from a ship. While that was a reasonable and accurate explanation, the sonar tracks were still pretty ugly on the surface of the ocean. They're now cleaned up as part of this update and the area looks as clear as it should:

To see more of what's changed, Google has created this short video to give you a tour:

Combined with the new patchless imagery, the earth is suddenly looking remarkably better all the way around. For more, check out this entry in the Google Lat Long Blog.

First released in 2007, the "Earth at Night" layer remains a very unique way to view the earth. Captured on the "dark side" of the planet, depending on the time of day, the images are a striking visual of the more urbanized areas of the planet.

However, the images were not easy to capture. For years, astronauts would try to capture the bright lights and only have blurry photographs to show for it, as the earth travels beneath them at 4.4 miles/second.

In 2003, Don Pettit developed an innovative system for capturing these images and he went on to capture over 2,500 photos, with thousands more captured in subsequent missions. You can read more about Don and his technique in this article at Air & Space Magazine.

To see the lights for yourself, simply click on the [Layers] in Google Earth, open [NASA], then [Earth City Lights] and click the button in there.. For the best results, disable your other layers and places to get a nice clean view of the earth. You should likely disable the atmosphere as well (under [View] --> [Atmosphere]), but I kind of like the glow it gives. It's a neat effect.

A big thanks to Don for pioneering this amazing technique, and hopefully as time goes on this imagery will become even higher-quality and more striking.

We first showed you the Monster Milktruck API demo nearly four years ago, but thanks to a reminder from the Google Earth page on Google+, I went back and played it a bit more. What a fun little game!

If you're not familiar with it, it's difficult to call it a "game" because it's actually just a tech demo; there is no objective, no scoring, and no way to lose a life. That said, it's remarkably fun to drive around various places in the world with just a few presses of your keypad. As long as you have the Google Earth Plug-in installed (which you most likely do), you can play the game here.

If you enjoy driving around in the milktruck, you'll really enjoy Paul van Dinther's Drive the A-Team van" game from a few years ago. It's the same basic idea, but with 3D trees, collision detection on the buildings, and missions to accomplish.

This is one of the great things about Google Earth; old games/files will automatically improve over time as better imagery and new 3D buildings are released!

We took our daughters (ages 5 and 8) on their first geocaching adventure this weekend and it was great! We used the very popular Geocaching.com website, which had quite a few Google Earth tools to make our adventure easier to plan.

In particular, they have a Geocache Google Earth Viewer that you can download and use. It's essentially a network link that shows all of their geocache locations in Google Earth -- over 1.6 million of them!

It was quite handy to fly around in Google Earth, find local caches, then click to see if they were worth checking out. We eventually stumbled upon a local "challenge" (10 locations to find, including this one) and had a good time.

While the icons are clickable, I would like to see them have a bit more info. In particular, the "last found" date would be helpful, so you could quickly see if a cache was likely to still be in place.

They also integrate Google Earth by allowing you to create "routes" that are generated by uploading KML files.

For all of you geocachers out there, what is your favorite way to search for new caches to find?

We talk about Google SketchUp quite often on here, and for good reason. It's an amazing piece of free software that allows you to create 3D models for use in Google Earth and other places.

We've shown you a few SketchUp-related books in the past (such as "SketchUp for Dummies"), but Robin de Jongh of sketchupuser.co.uk has written a book that might be of great interest to some of you: "Google SketchUp for Game Design".

The book covers some SketchUp basics, such as texture creation and modeling, but then gets into some cool game-specific sections such as:

• Sketching out the level.
• Importing to a professional game application (Unity 3D).
• Setting up your character controller.
• "Fencing" areas of your creation.
• Creating a realistic car with SketchUp.
• Exporting your game for others to play.

The book is full of screenshots and step-by-step tutorials to help make things as clear as possible. If you've ever had an interest in developing 3D games, this book would be a great way to get started.

You can pick up a copy of "Google SketchUp for Game Design" from Packt Publishing or on Amazon (including a version for Kindle).

Also, as always, if you build a noteworthy 3D model in Google Earth using SketchUp, please let us know about it so we can check it out for ourselves and perhaps feature it on the blog.