Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Graphical Editor for Google Earth Tours

So I've been experimenting with tours a lot recently and have found it easy to produce tours with lots of flights and placemarks that open and close but more difficult when you're trying to sync audio with the tour. Partly this is because of a bug but also because I'm frustrated with the need to hand code rather than use a graphical editor. GEarth itself allows you to produce tours without coding but you can't use it to tweak a tour e.g. change a section of the audio.

I think there is a widspread need for a tour editor that operates like Captivate:


How Captivate Works: As you can see from the screenshot Captivate works on a slide metaphor for producing video tutorials of software. Audio, annotations and text call outs within each slide can be sequenced and controlled in terms layering (what element lies on top of what) by manipulating the time line control (top right). The result of your edits is viewable in the screen view in captivate (bottom right). Slides represent a section of the tutorial (left column).

Suggestion for a GEarth Tour Editor: For GEarth tour this could all be produced within a web page that uses the GE plugin, a slide would represent a section of the tour. The plugin view would replace the main screen and editing the timeline would sequence the audio, control elements being turned on and off and control the camera flight.

LazyWeb Request: If anyone knows of something like this/is building it already, I'm all ears.

1 comment:

CustomEarthTours said...

Thanks for a very useful blog.

Have you seen planetinaction's tour generator?

http://www.planetinaction.com/software/tourgenerator.htm

The screenshots of the application are most interesting!