Hudson Plane Crash in Google Earth

I'm not often one to be overawed by content in Google Earth but if you watch one thing today, have a look at this: Its a tour following flight 1549

as it crash landed in the Hudson River and is really something special. Its by Jeral Poskey via Google Earth Blog, make sure you turn on 3D buildings layer to watch it.

The voices of all the flight controllers are added in real time. As Frank notes, the coolness of the pilot is amazing. Also you can hear the flight controllers talking really quickly about all the normal things they say like runways and altitudes - obviously they can talk at this speed because they and the pilots are used to hearing the set phrases. When the pilot reports the bird strike you can hear the controller's speech slow right down, obviously because this is not what he normally gets to say. You can just imagine the adrenaline pumping.

One thing that I thought worth adding was video of the event - I had a look on YouTube and here's something that I think adds to the tour:

Video of the Crash in Google Earth

but I don't think that comment should detract from an excellent piece of work by Jeral.

Why Blog or Twitter?

You may have noticed I've started twittering, there's a feed on the main page of my blog. Originally I thought twittering sounded like a sure fire way to interupt me constantly and stop me producing anything. However, talking to a friend I realised its a 'pull' technology rather than 'push'. No one expects you to read all their tweets. However, there still wasn't a good reason to actually tweet myself until I reflected on how I use this blog.

Blog as Notebook: This blog has multiple purposes but one I didn't predict when I started is that it serves as a kind of notebook. By writing things that can be read by all I'm forced to write better prose than I would if I was scribbling notes only for myself and I record all those useful links properly too. I probably search for something in my blog every other day or so on average and its been useful to see how my thinking changes on things.

Twitter and Lack of Time : The problem with this is that many of my ideas would make an interesting blog post but I don't have time to write them all up. Writing the basics of an idea in 140 characters (all you get in a tweet) is a challenge but it also gives me an excuse to jot an idea down without devoting an hour to writing it up in normal blog post. So as an experiment I've started tweeting and following some twitters to get the hang of it.

HowTo: Create a Simple Tour

UPDATE 23/7/09: I've now produced a more up to date tutorial that describes an easy way of setting up camera views for a tour (named 'HowTo 1' as it describes the first of a series I'm producing).

The instructions Google provide for the tour functionality in GEarth 5.0 are OK if you want to create a tour around a geographical feature in GEarth such as Mt Everest but often you want to annotate your tour or turn placemarks on or off e.g. to show photos such as this one:

Cleobury Mortimer Tour

In this tutorial I'll talk you how to best create an annotated tour like this one. Don't be put off by the tutorial length, I've just been detailed in places so as not to confuse people, its not really that complex:

1. Create a folder (in places column click a folder such as 'Temporary Places', click 'Add' in the menu bar and select folder).
2. Create placemarks, polygons or other elements to be included in the tour (see buttons on the top of the main screen). I've created a tour of Cleobury Mortimer in the UK with placemarks with photos in them and a polygon showing the rough extent of the town.
3. Check the elements are in your new folder (if you click the minus in a square to the left of your folder they should shrink up into the folder). If they aren't, simply drag and drop them into the folder.
4. Turn all the elements you have created off by unticking the tick box to their left
5. Click your folder so it has a blue background then click the 'Record a tour' button in the main button bar above the main screen. It's a video cam icon.
6. Click the red 'record' button in the box that appears bottom left
7. Move to a position where you can see an interesting view associated with your first placemark (or other element) you created to be in the tour .
8. Turn the placemark or element on. If its a placemark you may want to click it in the places column to view the pop up balloon too. You may want to turn it off again before moving to the next step but you can choose what you do and the tour will still work.
   
9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for all the elements in your tour.
10. Click the record button again to stop the tour. It should play what you've just recorded. If you're happy with it, click the disk icon in the tour control box bottom left. If not close the tour control box and return to step 5.
11. The tour should appear in your new folder. Turn off (i.e. untick) all the elements in your folder except the tour. Then right click your folder > Save Place as, then save the folder as a file to somewhere sensible.
    

You can now email it or post the file you've created on the web. It will contain your tour and all the elements you created to be in the tour.


Notes:

• Creating the folder is necessary to ensure all the elements in the tour are sent with the tour. My making you turn each element on ensures that the element control works properly and also can be useful when you have lots of data to show - you build the complex map up part by simple part.
• Step 11 is needed so that when the user open's your file then only the tour is clicked. The replay will get mangled if you don't have the tour in this state.
  
• If you want to use elements from the GEarth layers column then you must copy them into your created folder. Many placemarks in the Layers column can be simply copied (right click > copy) to your new folder. This does not mean that it is legal to do this, I'm not a lawyer so I can't advise on the legaility of doing this.
  
• You can also record historical data and other clever things in tours but I thought I'd stick to simple things to start with. A simple and very useful next step is to click the microphone button instead of the simple record button and record audio narration of your tour.
  
• Those who are happy to edit kml files can manually edit tours. John Bailey will probably produce a guest post here in the future about such advanced tour production.
• If you have multiple files open with multiple tours you could have problems playing tours. If things aren't working as they should, make sure you close the tour box (bottom left) before opening any other file with a tour in it.

My Google Tech Talk

This is my Google Tech talk which I also gave to AGU in December 08:



They didn't capture some of the annotations I used on screen very well so you may find it useful to view the presentation too (sorry for the quality, I had to hack something together because of the size of the original PowerPoint)

You may be worried that I'm becoming a little obsessed with the new tour functionality in GEarth 5.0 so you may be pleased to know there is no mention of it at all in this talk :). I'll be commenting on my fellow AGU Google tech talkers soon.

This was my AGU talk in 2007

Historical Imagery in a Tour

So I've been experimenting today with recording a tour that manipulates the historical imagery timeline. To see the example you will need to:

1. Open the file, open the folder (if it isn't open already)
   
2. Turn on the historical data button (clock icon, top bar if the time line is not visible top left)
   
3. tick the square to the left of the 'Southampton Uni Time tour' tour (if not ticked already)
   
4. click the name of the tour so the background goes blue
   
5. double click the text of the tour to start it

At the start of the tour, I move through the time data so that the historical images will load up on slow connections. If you're lucky enough to be on a quick connection i.e. you can see the images fully loaded as I do this you can fast forward and turn me into pinky to get to the main part of the tour.

Notes:

• Its very neat.
  
• Annotating the view as I do with polygons really helps the viewer see what you're talking about.
  
• I have a 3DConnexion mouse, for the last year its been used as a paper weight as I can't usually be bothered to switch from my ordinary mouse to fly around in Google Earth. When you do a tour it really does come into its own.
  
• Although the GEarth 5 documentation notes that you have to turn on the historical data it doesn't explain that you have to tick and select (by clicking the text) the tour to get it to turn on elements in the folder correctly. I've been testing this and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if its flaky.
• The ability to stop a tour, navigate into something that takes your fancy, restart the tour and have it fly you back to the point you left it is very smart.
  

Time Tip: Edit in Google Earth 5

Update 16 Feb 09: Cory and Barry point out in the comments that the time dialogue isn't there to change the 'main' time tag, i.e. the one that will control whether an element is visible or not when you use the timeline (the one that's been around in earlier versions of GE) but its to do with the new 'gx' time tags. Read their comments for details but I will say here I think this isn't great for usability, a dialogue labelled 'time/date' is going to cause confusion for people who won't know which time tag they are editing in properties.
________________

I haven't seen this flagged anywhere on the web yet so a quick tip:

Instead of having to edit the KML to add a time tag to your data so it can be viewed with the timeline you can now edit it directly in Google Earth:
- Right click in the places column > Properties > View > Date/Time.

I actually got a friend to build me a little .NET application so I could edit time tags in KML as it was so tedious to do it manually (and I kept on making mistakes). Neat that this has been added in GE5.

Updated Video Tutorials

I have discovered that my YouTube videos (original announcement post) about how to construct a basic map in Google Earth have become corrupted. So I've updated the video tutorials off YouTube in higher quality, the new Google Earth file can be found on this page of my online tutorials. Note this is for GE 4 so the controls look a little different now, it should still be useful though.

I came across the problem as I started experimenting with the tour functionality to see if I could use it for the same teaching purpose. If you're interested, I found it too fiddly for this use (admittedly not its main purpose).