Talk: Design in Google Earth

As promised, this is a link to an movie clip version of my talk at the American Geophysical Union(AGU) last month:

In it I use as an example a Google Earth project by Mark Mulligan who designed it primarily to be used by experts rather than the public. This link opens my new version.

Tree Cover Change Tour

I've added a few tour placemarks, the idea is that users open the file, read the introduction, get shown what they can see with the data and then go on to explore themselves. I talked to Mark about using his file and he was interested in what I've done with his work. It made me look again at the huge volume of material he has produced and I found some gems that I'll be using in the near future.

Technical Notes on Talk: I produced this by recording my PowerPoint presentation with Captivate software and converting it to flash as it allows me to capture the custom animation features of my talk. If anyone knows a way to capture these features and convert to a web friendly format, I'm interested to hear how.

Presentation Points: I think the presentation works well overall, its shorter than the original and I avoid the natural hiccups that would occur if it had been recorded live. However, recording narration slide by slide leads to my voice changing within the talk and I still have to work on a way to sound less wooden.

Think Old Newspapers

So last week I was involved in the a conference call with various people about the IPY Google Earth project. We were discussing how to promote the project further, a consensus that seemed to come out of the discussion was that there were some key stories that would be very attractive to the public that weren't being brought to the fore. For example, Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog suggested talking to the National Snow and Ice Data Center about bringing in their layer showing the recent retreat of arctic sea ice.

The content in the IPY layer is good already, its just the best stories aren't most apparent. Rather like a newspaper, its key to emphasize the big stories on the front page.

Old Newspaper layout

Think about all the immediate rules that you interpret from the layout of this Newspaper: newspaper title at the very top (Cheboygan Daily Tribune), headline is the biggest font near the top(Japs Declare War on U. S.), summary of the headline story is underneath (Jap Planes bomb both Hawaii and Guam) and photos relate to the columns of text they are close too.

Designers should be looking for the central narrative that they are trying to present to the public and emphasize it. At the current time we haven't evolved the 'norms' of how this should be done in a virtual globe such as Google Earth but, as with newspaper design, that will evolve.

Cartography, Mash-ups and Google Earth

Head's up on future posts: Lots of interesting things in the pipeline: material from my AGU talk, yesterday I was involved in a conference call with the creators of the International Polar Year (IPY) project and I could do with following up on my dafur post from last year.

Amusing map from Richard's talk, from 1902

Today I want to discuss a talk by Richard Fairhurst from the Open Street Map (OSM) project meeting in July (sound file and slides). I came across it because of the title; 'Why mash-ups suck and cartography matters'.(definition of mash up). IMHO the talk can be summarized into;
1 - Google map type mash-ups are useful in lots of situations (example given: Slide 4 adding speed cameras to a road map in the UK)
2 - Because google map mash-ups rely on adding layers onto a base layer you can only add so many layers before you soon reach a limit to their use
3 - In complex map situations you need to revert to cartographic techniques, mash-ups are no longer effective. (example given: Slide 8 and 9, London Tube map which is true to tube connections rather than map scale, which makes for a more useful map)
4 - Building a map with OSM is the best way to present complex data because you can access the base data, this enables you to customize the map, this cannot be done with google maps and other mapping systems.

I think Richard is right in a lot of ways, it is true that google map mash-ups are ineffective in many situations. I also think that bringing in knowledge and techniques from traditional cartography is vital to increase the quality of the online maps that are rapidly appearing throughout the web. Slides 10 and 11 from his talk are all great examples of how cartography can be used to improve web based maps.

However, Richard only refers to google maps, he doesn't mention Google Earth in his discussion. Google Earth can be used to build complex, interactive maps without the need to use complex mash-ups and so is much more accessible for public use. It can also be used as a holder so users can locate a small map within a larger area.

Good Cartographic Design map imported into Google Earth. Slide 19.

OSM is an important project but I think the average 'dabbler' with maps will be put off by the difficulty of using it compared with Google Earth, whatever the copyright advantages. If you download the .kmz

Selby.kmz

I produced you can also see I started producing an alternative to the above map using Google Earth tools, it wouldn't be as good for paper printing but it was very easy to do.

Back in the Saddle, Horse required

Sorry for the silence, I had hoped to do some posting over the holidays but broadband access was dire at my folks house so I gave up trying. I'm raring to catch up with email and all the interesting Google Earth contacts and links I made at AGU, however, I'm kind of limited by a broadband shut down we have in the University at the moment. I can only access the web from my ropey broadband at home.

Ho hum.

Why didn't I think of that?

So my AGU talk was warmly received yesterday, for any first time visitors you might like to check out this summary post I made a couple of weeks back. More on the content of my talk in a later post.

Screen shot of one of Declan's Blocks

Definitely the 'find' of the conference for me was the work of Declan de Paor , not because it was the most impressive looking Virtual Globe application but because he used some simple features in very powerful ways. Firstly, he's created a simple box using Sketchup (a free program for making models to export to Google Earth) and put an image on the top taken from Google Earth and a side view of a geological section. At this stage, a pretty clever way of teaching geology but then his blinding idea was to give the block an elevation above the ground that varies by time. By moving the timeline slider the block slides in and out of the earth, excellent for students who need to get the idea of what a geological section represents. I've yet to work out exactly how this works and he hasn't published a .kmz file of it.

His other great idea was to use a network link to control students in a class. The network link his students have is continually updating and Declan puts images in as screen overlays into the source of the network link and gets students to find the location matching the image, so it could be the image of an island students have to find. When he's happy all the students have found the island, by saving a text file on his computer he can change the network link and the students get a new image on screen to find. Very simple, very neat.

AGU, Polar Year and lack of time

I'm at AGU this week, its absolutely massive, 10,000+ earth scientists all milling around downtown San Francisco.

I caught up with Rhian from the International Polar Year at a special outreach session for them and hopefully I'll be talking to her and some of her colleagues about their Google Earth work sometime in the future.

What came out for me at the session was the enthusiasm of Polar Scientists for engaging with the public when it doesn't really score them any promotion points and they have to do it in their spare time. I think this kind of thing impacts on a lot of Google Earth projects (and I mean that for science outreach generally not just IPY), its always done as a minor part of someone's role or even in their own time. In this situation, tweaking and polishing up the design of a Google Earth project after the pain of collating the data together hardly ever gets the time it deserves.

The other thing I learnt is that if you are anything to do with Polar Science outreach you MUST use pictures of a penguins or polar bears in your talk :)

I'm talking at a special Virtual Globes session tomorrow so more on that later in the week.

Landscape building and Mobile devices

This week got swallowed by work on a big bid for a mobile project. The Google Earth part of the project will involve putting Google Earth on some field ready tablets and taking them into the field to explain former landscapes. For example, in the New Forest we teach a course to Geography students which explains how ice ages, 1000 years of human use for grazing and a second WW air site are all jumbled up into a modern day National Park.



View Larger Map

Previously we tried to do this with Sketchup but the free version isn't very good at building landscapes (althought the pro version has functionality in 'sandbox' apparently). Anyway, this week I discoverd another technique and I described it in a mini blog of mine.

From a design perspective its going to be very powerful to be able to combine former landscapes and a timeline although the size of the files could be an issue. The design is also controlled by the hardware, like many people trying out geo software in the field we have had problems with screen brightness, not being able to see all the colours in Google Earth severly limits its visualisation use. Which all goes to show, nothing like testing an idea to see how it works.