tour builder

This is part 4 of our series creating a Google Earth Tour builder. Today we are adding the ability to follow a path. Simply create a KML file containing a set of paths and / or placemarks and upload it below. The created tour will follow each path and circle each placemark in sequence. As you can see in the video below, we have not managed to get the path-following smooth. It must also be noted that Google Earth does have a built in feature to create a tour based on a path that we have made use of in the past.

The next steps we have planned are to smooth out the path following and to optionally open placemark balloons during the tour.

Create Tour

This is part 3 of our Tour Builder series where we try to develop tools to make creating Google Earth Tours easier.

When you create a tour that visits a list of locations, one thing you want to do is display the name of the location to the user. There are a number of possible ways to do this:

Basic Placemarks.
Probably the easiest method is to simply create a placemark with the appropriate name and an icon of your choice, or remove the icon altogether. You can adjust the font size and colour in the placemarks style settings, but it is has limited flexibility. In addition, if you are distributing your Google Earth Tour, labels can be affected by the settings in the user’s copy of Google Earth as well as screen shape and size.

A simple customised placemark label.

Placemark balloons.
Placemark balloons can contain HTML including css and JavaScript, which makes them very flexible. With JavaScript you can even animate the contents of the balloon. However, there are still significant limitations. Although you can get rid of the ‘directions’ row in the balloon, the border and close button cannot be customised or removed nor can the balloon be made transparent. You can position the balloon in the corner of the screen by putting the placemark off the edge of the screen, but as shown below, the balloon always leaves a margin between it and the edge of the screen.

Post-production.
If you are making your tour into a video, then the best option is probably to add most of your text using video editing tools.

Screen Overlays.
A Screen Overlay is a KML feature that allows you to place an image on screen at the location of your choosing. This is what is typically used for map keys or logos in KML files. PNG files with transparency are allowed, which is a significant advantage over placemark balloons. The main disadvantage of this technique is that it only allows images and not text or HTML so you must put your text into an image prior to creating the KML file.
It is also possible to use Google Earth Tour features to animate the image, sliding it onto the screen at the appropriate point in the Tour. You can try this tour to see it in action.

This is part 2 of a series where we gradually create a Google Earth Tour builder tool. We started last week with a tool that took a set of placemarks and created a tour that circles each placemark. The problem was the transition between placemarks just relied on Google Earth’s ‘fly to’ feature and wasn’t very nice at all. So today, we are adding an arcing flight between placemarks and more customization to the circling feature.

We get the view distance (range, in metres) and view angle (tilt) from the placemark.

Be sure to let us know in the comments if you find any bugs and any suggestions for further improvement / extra features.

Create Tour

Google Earth has the ability to display very sophisticated tours. However, this capability is underutilised. The reason for this is simple; there is a lack of good tools for creating tours, which means that it takes quite a lot of effort and technical know-how to create good tours. We plan to try and correct this by creating some tools to make tour creation easier.

For some examples of what is possible with tours we highly recommend having a look at the various tours created by Steven Ho.

Today, we are starting with the most basic type of tour: viewing a set of places in sequence. To use it, simply create a set of placemarks, save them as a KML file, upload the KML file below, then click the ‘Create tour’ button. The resulting tour should fly from placemark to placemark, circling each placemark once.

Time between placemarks:

Time circling placemark:

Create Tour

We intend to add more features over time, including customising each stop, better flying between placemarks and more.