Tours Archives
October 6, 2009
Google releases more tours to highlight climate change
A few weeks ago, Google released a series of Google Earth tours that highlighted some climate change issues, in preparation for the COP15 meetings in Copenhagen later this year.
Today, Google has released a few more tours. The new tours all deal with deforestation, and show ways to help protect forests from further deforestation in the future.
The tours are:
Greenpeace: Talking about how companies can work together to help.
Conservation International: A close look at Madagascar.
WWF: A virtual tour of the peatland swamps in Borneo.
You can view all of the tours on Google's COP15 site.
Posted by mickmel at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
September 30, 2009
Loop Links, Biodiversity and the Law of the Sea
Loop Links: Rich has just posted a creative solution to a problem he was having in Google Earth. Wanting to connect two lines via a "loop", he built a spreadsheet that can generate the necessary code for you automatically. Enter your starting and ending lat/lon, and it'll calculate the rest. You can download the spreadsheet here, but you'll probably want to read the instructions on his site first.
Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Tour: An increasingly popular way to show presentations is using the Google Earth "Tour" feature, especially via the Google Earth Plugin. Recent examples include the Copenhagen fly-through and Google's ambitious climate change tools and tours. The Biodiversity tour is another great example of how the tour mode can be used. I would have liked to see more close-ups of things they discuss, but they used the mapping and borders very effectively.
Healy 2009 Law of the Sea Mapping: Kurt has just posted a large KMZ file
showing the path that the ship "Healy" has taken as it continues it's polar mapping. The file includes the ship's path, images from each point, weather and water depth data, and a time-lapse YouTube video of the journey. You can read more about the Law of the Sea Mapping Program here. The time-lapse video can also be seen below:
Posted by mickmel at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2009
Adding Audio to Google Earth Tours
Richard Treves writes the Google Earth Design blog where he often analyzes various Google Earth content and provides critiques and suggestions with the intent to help people understand how to improve the user experience. Richard works at the School of Geography at the University of Southampton.
Richard has been exploring how to make use of the new Record Tour functionality introduced in Google Earth 5 last February. I've mentioned many times that the GE 5 Tour functionality has great potential and have written about some amazing tours produced if you have programming skills (see for example the Apollo 11 tour). However, you can develop some pretty nice tours without coding.
Check out Richard's tutorial on how to add audio to a recorded tour. As he points out, it is best to record your visualizations first, and then play it back and record your audio in synch with the playback.
Richard also has written two other "howto" articles on Tours: 1) Simple Tour; and 2) Adding elements.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2009
Afghanistan News Overview in Google Earth
As part of a news feature called "Crossroads Afghanistan" CBCNews.Ca has created an excellent Google Earth tour which describes the situation in Afghanistan. The GE tour is narrated by a news commentator and has nice photo overlays to illustrate points, and zooms in to the different areas of the country while describing conditions there. The tour is embedded in their web site using the Google gadget for embedding tours with the GE plugin - watch it here (you may need to scroll down the page a bit). It's well done and well worth watching (I learned several things I didn't know about Afghanistan). via tweet by @googleearth
More information on Tours for Google Earth:
Posted by FrankTaylor at 8:02 AM | Comments (1)
August 12, 2009
Google Earth Lesson Presentation
Richard Treves writes the Google Earth Design blog where he often analyzes various Google Earth content and provides critiques and suggestions with the intent to help people understand how to improve the user experience. Richard works at the School of Geography at the University of Southampton.
Last year Richard began some work developing a lesson plan using GE to describe the flooding of the Brahmaputra River. Now he has upgraded the plan to use Google Earth 5's Tour option to present the content like a 3D movie. You can watch the new version here (it uses the GE plugin, and has audio, hit the "Play" button once GE loads). I think his new version greatly improves the presentation of the lesson content. The way he presents content for how water reaches the river is well done, and easy to follow. I like the use of placemarks which change to illustrate points. He also is using Dropbox to host the content, which is a pretty cool way to share GE content.
[UPDATE: Richard has updated his lesson to reflect the suggestions I made below.]
Since Richard likes to critique content, I have a few tips for him: 1) I think the first thing that should appear in his tour is a title screen overlay for the lesson (not just a voice intro). 2) He might want to mention on the title screen to turn on your speakers. 3) The embedded player should be set up with "Autoplay" rather than forcing the user to hit "Play". 4) Alternatively, his web page could also provide some pointers such as turning on audio/speakers, title, etc. 5) The video at the end could be embedded in the placemark or shown on the same web page.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 7:34 AM | Comments (3)
More entries for this category:
- Best Google Earth Tour To Date: Apollo 11 - July 22, 2009
- Look at the Moon in Google Earth - Available Now! - July 20, 2009
- Snoovel - Google Earth Tour Creation and Hosting Site - July 7, 2009
- North Shore City, New Zealand in Google Earth - July 2, 2009
- New Places Site - Record Movie Postcards in Google Earth - June 22, 2009
- Gimme Shelter Campaign via Google Earth - June 18, 2009
- Using Google Earth to Review Urban Development Project - June 15, 2009
- World Oceans Day, 3D Design Competition, Britain Archeological Site, New Imagery Tour Idea - June 8, 2009
- Links: New 3D Tours Gallery, Earth API Update - May 29, 2009
- Google Earth Outreach Upgrade - May 20, 2009
- Swiss Fighter Video Synched - GE 5 Style - April 26, 2009
- Formula One Circuit Tour - Car Simulation - April 24, 2009
- Links: Ocean Now, Michigan Earth Day, Goldman Prize, Convention Center, Queen Mary - April 21, 2009
- 3D Tour of Tahina Expedition Catamaran - April 20, 2009
- Synchronized YouTube with Google Earth Plugin - April 15, 2009
- Great Lakes Under Water Features Added To Google Earth - April 14, 2009
- Simple Embedding of a Google Earth 5 Tour - April 10, 2009
- Why Google Earth 5 Tours in a Plugin Rock - April 9, 2009
- Introduction to Mars Tour with GE Plugin - April 7, 2009
- Touring with Google Earth Plugin - April 6, 2009
- New Google Earth 5 Plugin Released - April 1, 2009
- Links: KML Research Winners, Tour Tutorial, Tour for Mountains, Mining Tour - March 13, 2009
- Heli-Ski Tour in Google Earth - March 12, 2009
- Google Earth 5 Tour Roundup - February 26, 2009
- Links: Missing Atlantis, In the Navy, Predators Not Censored, Utrecht Building Plans, English Lake District - February 24, 2009
- This Google Earth File Could Make you Sick - February 20, 2009
- Google Earth 5 Record Tour Notes - February 18, 2009
- Jimmy Buffet Helps Announce Google Earth 5 - February 5, 2009
- Google Earth 5 - Initial Reactions - February 4, 2009
- EveryTrail Supports New Tours for Google Earth 5 - February 3, 2009
- Google Earth 5 - Record Tour Mode Features - February 2, 2009