Friday, February 13, 2009

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.

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