Events in Google Earth

The cliquey Foo Camp was born out of a joke at O’Reilly that they should create a literal “Foo Bar”. The event is held each year at O’Reilly’s headquarters and during the 2006 event (held during August 25-27, 2006) Google organised a flyover photograph for inclusion in Google Earth.

The very high-resolution image shows the “tech superstar” attendees lying around the grass with a simple “Welcome to Foo Camp” sign, but surely it was a missed opportunity for writing messages with human bodies? Of course, if the Google Sightseeing team are invited to next year’s Foo Camp, then we’ll definitely organise everyone to spell out a rude message.

Updated: It turns out that the Foo Campers did draw exciting things in the Orchard, it’s just that only a small part of the image was uploaded to the default Google Earth layer. I’ve created a Google Earth image overlay of the full-sized image (2.28MB).

The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a space exposition held during October 20-21, 2006, that featured all sorts of space related fun including “Live rocket launches, prize competitions, rocket plane flights, jet pack flights, astronaut talks, an entire space theme park on the ground, and much more.”

As part of the event the organisers released lots of Google Earth content, including 3D models and the Google Earth Space Atlas, all of which can be downloaded from the Google’s mini site.

More info: FooCamp wiki on the overflight and Google Earth Blog post on the Wirefly X Prize photograph.