Talk in Google Earth: HowTo

Yesterday I was one of 4 speakers at an outreach event run by Southampton University on the topic of 'Use and Misuse of the Oceans' for Year 10 students. The keynote speaker was Chris Packham who was mobbed for his signature all day. He was kind enough to compliment me on my talk which I'd done completely in Google Earth.

Screen shot from the talk showing the rough location of Lake Aggassiz, the Laurentian ice sheet and outflow routes during the last ice. This lake sometimes breached its banks catastrophically and the rush of fresh water to the NE Atlantic may have interrupted the North Atlantic drift.

The key reason for doing this was that my talk discussed geographical/oceanographic features that varied from thousands of km down to a few m in size and also that the spatial relationship of the features to each other was important. However, there were a few difficulties with giving the talk totally in GE:

1. GE is prone to crash with the amount of data I had produced for the talk
2. Motion in GE on a laptop is liable to be 'choppy' because of the lack of a powerful graphics card
3. There was no wireless in the venue

My solution was to record the talk using GE and Fraps as little movie clips then to combine them together as one movie clip. It sort of worked. The problem is that whilst Fraps records the Google Earth background very well it fails to capture images and movie clips embedded in pop up bubbles so these have to be linked separately. Also, working video controls in the actual talk (play and pause) proved tricky, a slideware navigation system (next, back) is much easier. Another feature of this approach was that navigating the movie clip introduced little gaps in the movies as I struggled to synchronize what I was saying with the events on screen, Chris said he thought it actually helped as it allowed the school kids to process what was happening but I would like to be more in control of the action.

A solution to this is:
1] Produce talk in Google Earth
2] Record GE transitions (i.e. flying from space to Plockton on the West Coast of Scotland) using Fraps as .avi movie files.
3] Import .avi files into separate slides in powerpoint.
4] Find youtube videos and convert and download to .avi files using Vixy
(note I haven't used it but it looks better than the process I used)
5] Embed those .avi files as separate slides

I'll be releasing the KMZ file of the talk at a later date, I want to polish it a little more.

New Video Tutorials

Aug 2010: Now Updated

Screen shot (partly doctored) of part of the tutorial

Summary: Want to learn the basics of Google Earth? I've created a two part set of video tutorials, part 1 teaches you how to navigate in Google Earth and part 2 teaches you the basic tools for creating and saving an interactive map.

GE_Tools.kmz

Rational: The videos are embedded within Google Earth itself, there is an overlay image with instructions and videos are within placemarks on top. I hope this set up encourages users to practise creating content in GE. This hasn't been done before with videos (to my knowledge) but is similar to how the basic tutorials in sketchup work. There are multiple sources of teaching material about Google Earth; Google's own text and video tutorials, my own v3 video tutorials out there and even a manual for how to use Google Earth. Given I am always pointing out 'just because you can does not mean you should', why am I publishing yet another set of tutorial materials?

1. By putting tutorials within GE itself I think there is more chance that users will practise using the tools rather than just reading/watching and to learn, 'doing' is much more effective than 'reading'.
2. The Google documentation is thorough but for a beginner I think it goes into too much detail, there is value in a newbie completing a well bounded task. In the tutorials users use the basic tools to create and save a map for new students coming to Southampton University - a complete task. The 'more' placemarks link to other web resources if they want to research beyond the core materials of the tutorials.
   
3. I am always on about good design and I mix some basic design good practicises into the tutorials - not just HowTos but also BestTos. My experience of teaching is that it's better to mix design skills in with technical skills rather than approach them separately.
   

However, the result is not perfect. GE wasn't designed with this use in mind so it took a lot of fiddling to get it to work properly. There are still some rough edges left; not being able to control exactly how much of the screen the main overlay takes up (so I have to instruct users to move the screen around) is an example problem. And it won't work in mac GE because the movies are flash based.

Having said that, I think it was still worth doing because of reason (1) above. I'll be interested to see just how sucessful it is at leading people to practise creating Google Earth maps.

If you wish to re-use it for training users/students yourself, it's published under a creative commons license;

part of the justification for doing this was the outreach potential for the school of Geography so attribution is important.

Digital Watches are Cool

Since my post on the parallels between traditional crafts such as pottery and building Google Earth projects I've been musing on the 'we are infatuated with the tool' idea as applied to Google Earth. The basic idea of this is that upon introduction of a new tool there is usually a period when experts apply the new technology uncritically in applications where it shouldn't be used. I've come up with a couple of analogies:

The Atomic bomb: Following its infamous use in the 2nd World War 1950's engineers came up with a bizarre set of uses including setting off a series of bombs to build giant canals (from Bill Bryson's wonderful autobiography) and even a plan to use atomic explosions as rocket fuel.





Following this period of mad ideas we now have a well developed sense of the limitations of nuclear fision.

The second example is illustrated by a quote from Douglas Adams:

"[of humans] ...a race so backward they still thought digital watches were cool"

My dad used to have an analogue watch which I was allowed to wind up every evening. My interest didn't last, I clearly remember hounding the first kid at school who got a digital watch, I wanted to keep pressing the buttons to see those magic red figures light up. Unsurprisingly he wanted me to buzz off and stop wasting his watch battery. The infatuation with digital watches we all had didn't last of course, if you're wearing a watch as you read this its probably an analogue watch run by a quartz battery watch. Again, following a fascination with one technology (quartz digital watches) we quietly learned how to use the technology properly - the hype didn't last.

Neither of these examples are perfect, you could argue that the public have an overly developed fear of nuclear radiation which affects our present use of nuclear technologies. You could also argue that the popularity of analogue watches is linked to aesthetics as much as practicality. However, the analogies are there to illustrate the idea rather than be completely water tight and I think they work rather well.

So are we in the 'cool digital watches' period with the virtual globe technology? I would say we are, you don't have to look far to find Google Earth projects with badly thought out icons, overly bright lines and a bafflingly complex structure in the places column. The faster we get over our infatuation the better.

Which isn't to say Google Earth isn't a great tool, I wouldn't be blogging about it if I thought it was rubbishj, it's just we're not using it correctly yet.

Regions Solution

I've long been suspicious of regions as a solution to data overload. The basic idea is that you can define an altitude above which placemarks are not visible but below which they appear. This meets two separate needs, firstly it is a way of avoiding visual clutter on screen, secondly it means large data sets can be viewed without loading all the data at once. Neat.

The problem is that users with a low IT literacy skills may not realise regions are operating, they can click a layer in the places column and be annoyed that nothing appears because they are at too high an altitude to load the placemarks in. To my high IT literate readers this may seem a petty point surely they'll explore and find the placemarks popping up? No. They might not. They might click away and find the secret middle section to the magic roundabout theme tune*. In which case you've lost them.

I have a solution. Below is a zoomed-in a view of the Dafur default layer** which uses regions, notice the red one out on its own center of the image.


If you zoom out it will dissapear. But in its place a translucent magnifying glass placeholder tells you there is something worth zooming in to see in the square region it marks. Obviously this works best when there are multiple placemarks hidden under the magnifying glass placeholder.


The magnifying glass image overlay can be tagged with its own region so it appears at an altitude above the one where the placemarks appear. It should also be explained in an introduction otherwise users won't understand what it means which is as bad as it not being there in the first place.

*Non UK readers will struggle to understand the humour to this.
**Disclosure: I'm currently doing some consulting for USHMM on Google Earth.

Design Example: Wetlands

So over at Using Google Earth recently John posted a Google Earth project for use in a presentation about a conservation situation: authorities are seeking to place a landfill site in a sensitive area in California. It took me back to my masters degree in hydrogeology where we spent a lot of time looking at landfill design so I thought it would be an interesting case study: how would you convert John's file so it could be published as a web resource for the public?



Here's the original KMZ and here is my reworking

What I did:

1. Allow users to see some of the file structure, the original was just a closed folder which is fine for a presentation but doesn't encourage exploring when put on the web.
2. Change the name of the 'wetlands' placemark to 'introduction' and to give it a more meaningful camera icon - its main content is the photos and it serves well as an introduction to the project.
3. I marked out the proposed landfill site in purple with a black outline. This allows it to be easily distinguished from the background terrain and the other overlays without making it too bright (I tried red as a fill but it was too much).
4. Marked a series of zones on the map to give the user a sense of scale. These are simple rectangles but they would be better as 'buffer zones' (tutorial) showing all regions within 1km, 2km and 3km of the boundary of the landfill site. To generate these you need to use a true GIS package.
5. I turned off the boundaries of the land use types as they were different colors and so confusing to the eye. If I had the time I would have changed them all to be black and put them back in.
6. I also turned off the 'other' class of land use as I wasn't sure what it really was showing, strictly it should be everything else in the view but it wasn't.

Useful links for more discussion of these points:

• folders
• introductions
• art of map making (video)

Other Project Reviews by me
Dafur
Tree cover project reviewed in my talk

Further discussion about risk zones: I said buffer zones would be better than the rectangles, in fact even these could be improved upon to explain risk. What you really want is a model which takes account of tidal flows, the river flow and other factors to identify the risk of pollution at any point in the view. Without any modelling at all you can see that the hills are at zero risk of being polluted and it would be pretty difficult for the pollution to flow up river, most of the risk would lie downstream even into the sea beyond.

Craft of Google Earth?

On the Thinking aloud radio 4 (UK) program recently they discussed the idea of craft in modern society. Of the notable points they made were several relevant to design of Google Earth projects:

- Comparisons were made between computer programmers and traditional crafts such as pottery, musicians and architects. All of them require a detailed knowledge of related areas and to learn them requires constant experimentation and making mistakes. This is certainly true of building Google Earth (GE) projects, I know a lot about drawing icons because icons are important in GE projects. As for making mistakes, I'm always tinkering about with things that don't quite work in GE to get them looking right, I rarely know the 'right' way to do something complex before I start. One commentator even went so far as to carve 'creativity is making mistakes' in the concrete beam of his studio.

- Many craft people talk of knowledge and memory embedded in their hands. I told my Google Earth students this as a way of encouraging them to go out and experiment, if they don't practice building GE projects they are going to forget everything I've shown them very quickly.

- The discussions also involved discussing computer aided drawing and how it had affected architecture. Commentators felt that this introduction of technology has led to users forgetting about good design because they became infatuated with the tools. Another example is the appearance of microwaves in kitchens, remember all the fuss about the wonderful things you could do with this tool? It was only after lots of use we realized what its truly good for: warming up leftovers and cooking baked potatoes quickly. It's only after some time and experimentation that a community discovers what the tools can be best used for and starts producing valuable items again. IMHO we are well and truly in this period with virtual globes, I see lots of examples where I end up thinking someone just whacked a lot of data into GE because they thought it would be 'neat' rather than really thinking of what GE is actually good at doing to their data.

Powers of 10

This film about the very small to the very large popped into my head last week, I remember being fascinated by it as a child which is probably linked to my current interest with Google Earth. It was created by Ray and Charles Eames who were brilliant designers in a range of areas.



I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the squares so you could fly through them in in Google Earth with the film itself as a placemark. Unfortunately a cycle track runs through the area of the original picnic - blasphemy! IMHO there should have a plaque there to commemorate the site :) (maybe there is?). To deal with the cycle track I put in a couple of screen shots from the film as overlays at the one to ten meter scale. Its for fun so I did the squares by eye rather than calculate them precisely, for example the last 10,000km square is a fair bit smaller than the stated scale, it's as large as I could make it. You are limited to only a few orders of magnitude by the scale of Google Earth but it was still fun to do.

Powers Of 10
(Note: you may have to right click, 'save as' and then open the file from the saved location - I have an unresolved problem with it not opening automatically from my browser)

The fame of the film seems to be continuing, for more details click here.
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Later: Frank of Google Earth Blog just emailed to say what I thought was a browser problem with the file (and hence local to me) is a MIME type error. I've replaced the link to one to his servers above, he's done some work on improving it too.