I was in Chicago this past weekend and decided to take a nice long walking tour of the city. Coming from Dallas, I didn't think 90 degrees was anything to worry about given the 102+ oven that is Dallas. However, in Dallas I never walk anywhere. Ten minutes into the walk, I was sweating bullets: my clothes were drenched and my eyes were burning from the sweat seeping into my eye lids. I did whatever I could to find shade and ended up taking the longest route possible just to be out of the sun.

Apparently, this is a pretty common occurrence for city dwellers. A common problem with a potential solution: Google Shade Walk, a google earth/maps feature that shows you the most shaded way to walk to your destination.

The version of Google Earth released for Android 3.0+ devices features a 3D UI, meaning it clearly knows the heights of all the buildings on the map or it wouldn't be able to accurately represent them on a 3D map.

If it knows the height and geographical coordinates of all given buildings in an area, and with the appropriate layers selected can even show trees... and if you search for walking or biking directions in Google Maps it can give pretty good time estimates on how fast you're likely to be moving, and knows the position of the sun at any given time...Then it should be easy to add an option to create a route based on availability of shade along said route.

This would benefit pedestrians greatly when traversing unfamiliar territory by foot. The best part is, it shouldn't actually require a device to be compatible with the 3D map view to use this feature. It doesn't have to DISPLAY the height of the buildings and/or trees. All it has to do is access that information from Google's database to incorporate the data into its route calculation. This should make it compatible with ANY smartphone/tablet with ANY version of Google Maps or Google Earth.