VGI in Education Talk

I've done a talk discussing a project using VGI in teaching a first level Earth Science course:

I got students to use Google Earth but I explain how you could use Google My Maps as well. The feedback from the course was excellent so I thought it worth discussing how to set one up yourself.

Streetview now Captured by Tours

I was away when GEarth v6 was released but I was excited to see the pegman make it into GEarth bringing the smooth usability of streetview in GMaps into GEarth.

Others have documented the feature well but no one in the blogosphere appears to have noticed (and isn't mentioned in the above clip) that you can now record streetview in tours too: tour of the walk from Waterloo Station to the London Eye. All you do is;

1. record a tour in the normal way,
2. drag and drop the pegman (orange man icon on the main screen controls) half way through to enter streetview
3. navigate around in streetview
4. click 'Exit Street View' button top left of your screen to exit street view
5. stop the tour.

to quote a famous meerkat: 'simples'

This has a ton of applications:

• What better way to direct your friends to the pub?
• Real estate (relators in US speak) adverts showing the town amenities close to their property
• Teaching human geography

Well done Google, a smart feature all round.

Techy KML Details: GEarth 6 has spawned a new gx KML element: "gx:ViewerOptions", this element inserted into a FlyTo parent with"gx:option name="streetview"" tells GEarth to changes from normal to Streeview in the middle of a tour. ViewerOptions also allows historical imagery and sunlight conditions to be captured as well.

Blog Break and Infographics in the Media

After slogging my way through the summer while all my colleagues took leave I'm about to take 3 weeks off myself to sort some things at home and holiday abroad. I haven't been posting much because of trying to kick a few projects into shape before leaving them for a while. I'll be back 2nd week of December.

I'll leave you with a fascinating set of videos I've found by Geoff McGee for a fellowship he completed at Stanford University. Its about data visualisation as a story telling medium and focusses on graphics in the media. What's interesting about it is the same problems I've noticed in using neo-geo tools in education and outreach come up in their topic area. Points that particularly resonate with me:

• Martini Glass Presentation: The importance of an introduction, context setting and explanation of what you can 'do' with an interactive web graphic or complex print graphic (section III: Telling Data Stories). Without this, your creation is just a set of pretty colours to the user. The Martini glass stem represents the video clip slide presentation introduction and the triangular glass represents the freedom of the user to explore the graphic on their own.
• Attractive Does Not = Effective: A beautiful looking stream graphic showing box office results for movies with time is discussed in part IV, various commentators point out that it grabs attention wonderfully but then is difficult to interpret what it shows.

Timelines and Tours outside Google Earth

I've come across a couple of examples of GEarth features implemented elsewhere which were worth a mention:

Timeline Example: I thought this timeline from a New York Times graphic is much better than the timeline in Google Earth:

• Easier to grab and move the jaws, in GEarth the jaws are too small
• The play button only allows the jaws to move together, in GEarth you can press play and the far side of the jaws will move which is too complex for users to understand and utilise IMHO
• The time labels are simple and clear whereas in GEarth the labels are more fussy
• The blue shading communicates 'this is the time range' in a clear way and its semi transparent so you can see the graph below it.

The GEarth timeline remains high on my list of things Google should really fix in GEarth.

Tour Example: I think the tour feature of GEarth is one of its strongest features allowing user in presentations or promotional film clips. I came across a film sequence in a TED talk which has a form remarkably like a tour:

(BTW the clip is fascinating and well worth watching in full)

The clip 'zooms' down from large to small scale and at the destination scale the camera moves around a 3D object which is then manipulated in various ways to illustrate the relationships of neurons. Compare it with this GEarth tour:

The building clip has a poor frame rate and the building isn't manipulated in some way (like showing the inside rooms) but otherwise, the format is exactly the same. I'm in the middle of researching to best design tours at the moment and the Seung clip is a lovely illustration of how the results of my studies will not just apply to GEarth and other Virtual Globes but to any 3D visualisation system where zooming across scales in a film clip is important.

With the Seung clip I defined where it should start, see how to get a YouTube video to start where you want it.

Visualizing Motion

Static and Dynamic Motion Viz: Timelines offer an excellent way to visualise motion of people or vehicles. I've discussed timelines in GEarth with a video illustration previously. Recently I've been hanging out at the GIS Stack forum which IMHO is an excellent resource. A recent question was on visualizing motion statically: what were the best techniques? What software could you use? I've pitched in with an answer along with some other contributors.

Static vs Dynamic: What doesn't come out in the discussion is would you choose a static option over the dynamic one if you had a choice? I think for the expert map reader (I'm thinking of a biologist tracking animal movement as an example) a static map has a number of advantages, it can be scanned quickly to find the point/time you are interested in and values of velocity are easy to read off. By comparison, an animation must be played to get to the point you want to view. As it can be printed it's also very portable.

For the bloke on the street, I think the dynamic version has most advantages: understanding the static version requires interpretation, the animation is instantly recognisable. Also, animations instantly attract the attention which is important for the public but not necessary for the expert.

Recording Tours via Screen Recorder

I've lots of deadlines coming in at the moment so excuse the lack of posts last week.

Prior to the appearance of the tour feature of Google Earth in v5 I discussed recording a tour by using screen recorder Fraps. Recently Google Earth Blog has discussed a smart variation on this idea: set the fly to rate very slow and then deliberately speed up the movie in a movie editing package (see Be Travellers post). This gets over a major problem of recording a movie with screen capture straight from GEarth: the resulting movie loses the smoothness and looks 'choppy' (the technical term is to say the frame rate is low). Smart idea!

Here's the video example:

The HowTo write up Mike Griffin does is good but I have some suggestions (numbers in brackets refer to their step numbers):

Dialog box in the way (1): The way to deal with this is to simply drag the dialog box so most of it is off screen. Its not particularly elegant but it solves the issue.

Setting Viewpoints with Placemarks (2): as I suggest in this tutorial, if you choose your viewpoint before you create a viewpoint placemark its better because GEarth automatically sets the current view as the Placemark's view.

Manual Flights Clicking (4): The main problem with the technique Mike suggests to my mind is that you have to sit there manually clicking placemarks and then watching as GEarth flies from placemark to placemark incredibly slowly. This would drive me nuts for anything but the shortest tour.

If you can handle XML an alternative is to dive into the KML you've produced in setting up the placemark viewpoints to grab the Camera or LookAt data (in italics below) for each placemark.

<Placemark id="ElkRidge">
<name>Elk Ridge</name>
<description>shortly after the eruption</description>
<Camera>
<longitude>-122.2989801778228</longitude>
<latitude>46.29626193853221</latitude>
<altitude>13.39603579634948</altitude>
<heading>-31.06642935444568</heading>
<tilt>90.62346382665406</tilt>
<roll>-6.361109362927034e-014</roll>
<altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode>
<gx:altitudeMode>relativeToSeaFloor</gx:altitudeMode>
</Camera>
<styleUrl>#msn_grn-blank1</styleUrl>
<Point>
<coordinates>-122.2993707244499,46.2969626924056,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>

You can insert this data from each placemark into a FlyTo construction in a tour:

<gx:FlyTo>
<gx:duration>3</gx:duration>
<gx:flyToMode>smooth</gx:flyToMode>
<Camera>
...same data as above in here...
</Camera>
</gx:FlyTo>

using a series of these will give you a tour and you can edit the duration tags to alter the speed of flight from placemark to placemark. When you're happy with how the tour looks you go back through the tour KML resetting each duration to be x10 what it was previously. Now you can set the screen recording going as Mike suggests, run your incredibly slow tour and let the computer do the work recording it while you go and have some lunch.

Other Advantages: Recording tours as videos rather than as tours in GEarth has other advantages: you can access all the features of the movie software you use (such as fade in transitions) which aren't available in Google Earth. As time goes on I expect Google will add more features to tours.

Maps and Art

There is an intriguing outbreak of using maps in art in the blogosphere;

The above image is of the English channel and is from the intriguing Fata Morgana which, using the latest feature in the Google Maps API has taken away everything but the words (and in the UK, what words! 'Hougham Without' in the middle of the image sounds lovely).

Axis maps release a set of posters working on a similar idea but putting a ton more cartographic love into their work.

Via Ogle Earth I found a wonderful reflective essay on the juxtaposition effects of imagery from different times: HiLoBrow.

And finally, Evert Schut finds inspiration in the many and varied patterns Google Earth produces at Google Earth Art.