Street View imagery released in Romania

Google has just released Street View imagery in Romania, the first new release since Google Earth 6 came out last week.

romania.jpg

As you know, Google Earth 6 completely changed the way that Street View imagery is handled. If you’re not familiar with the changes, this video will show you how it works:

In addition, as pointed out by Google Earth Design, you can now include Street View when creating a tour in Google Earth! Rich even built a sample KML to show it in action.

It works just as you’d expect:
1. record a tour in the normal way,
2. drag and drop the pegman (orange man icon on the main screen controls) half way through to enter streetview
3. navigate around in streetview
4. click ‘Exit Street View’ button top left of your screen to exit street view
5. stop the tour.

He also includes a bit about the technical aspects of the KML that is generated:

GEarth 6 has spawned a new gx KML element: “gx:ViewerOptions”, this element inserted into a FlyTo parent with”gx:option name=”streetview”" tells GEarth to changes from normal to Streeview in the middle of a tour. ViewerOptions also allows historical imagery and sunlight conditions to be captured as well.

This certainly opens up a lot of possibilities for great new tours using Google Earth. Check out Rich’s full article for more information, and let us know if you create any noteworthy tours using this new feature.

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US Navy Flight Week in Google Earth

Back in October, Chris Yonge of Studio Cruz and Christiaan Adams created a very cool Google Earth Tour for the San Francisco Fleet Week. The tour includes a voice overlay, images, video and more, all in one nice package.

To view the tour, you can download this KMZ file or simply watch the YouTube video below:

Because of the complexity of the tour, Chris and Chritiaan wrote up the following information on how they came up with the idea for the Tour, as well as how they were able to put it together technically. Hopefully this information is helpful if you plan to build a similar Tour for a project of your own.

This project emerged from a desire to help Fleet Week 2010 showcase its mission using a 3D animated tour in Google Earth.  Studio Cruz was recommended by the Google Earth team, and was chosen as the developer, after having produced other successful Google Earth tours, including one for Potter Drilling of Redwood City, CA in 2009, which was showcased at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.  Studio Cruz worked with the Fleet Week organizers to create the seven minute tour in advance of the Navy and Marines’ Fleet Week celebration in early October 2010.  The timescale was tight – only five weeks - but since no complex coding was involved it was judged possible.

The tour had three goals: to introduce the concept of Fleet Week to the public, to explain the serious purpose behind the public events (liaison between Navy and civilian disaster relief specialists), and to provide a brief history of the US Navy’s disaster relief work in the SF area and around the world. The script directed that the tour be graphics intensive, including four YouTube videos, interactive balloons, screen overlay animation, a live link to an existing online KMZ history of Bay Area earthquakes on a USGS site, and precisely synchronized professional narration.

Studio Cruz began work on the tour in early September. The YouTube videos were downloaded as Flash videos using RealPlayer, trimmed to the relevant sections using Moyea FLV Editor, then uploaded as new videos ready for embedding into the relevant parts of the tour. The script was split into 45 sections of between one and three sentences, and placeholder MP3s were created in the studio. These were later replaced by the professional narration. Photographs provided by the Navy were cropped and resaved as JPGs, and screen/ground overlays were built in Photoshop and saved out as 24-bit PNG files.

Building the tour took slightly over a week, with coding and graphics being made by Chris Yonge, principal of Studio Cruz. Since Google intended the tour to be revised and reused for future Fleet Weeks the KML code was extensively commented, down to the words spoken in each piece of narration. After the build stage, the placeholder narration audio files were replaced with the final professional versions. This required minor timing adjustments throughout the tour, but once that was done the tour was delivered and posted.

Google also wanted a video version of the tour for visitors to the Fleet Week site who did not have Google Earth. For clarity and quality this was done using the screen capture program Camtasia; the resulting AVI files were assembled in AfterEffects and adjusted. However, some parts of the tour did not capture well: in particular the slowdown caused by Camtasia operating in the background meant there was an unacceptable pause before the YouTube videos started. The decision was made, a few days before the deadline, to rewrite the tour specifically for the video capture. Animation, video, narration, and interactive balloons were removed from the KML file. The reduced tour was run and captured as a video in Camtasia, and the resulting files imported into AfterEffects. The removed items were then replaced as individual layers, resulting in much higher quality. The raw animation was around 14 Gb, which was compressed to 700 Mb for uploading to YouTube. It can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le5GqmV6ASg.

Both the tour and video were completed on time and to budget. The video alone had over nine thousand views the first weekend. Studio Cruz can be found at www.studiocruz.com.



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Timelines and Tours outside Google Earth

I’ve come across a couple of examples of GEarth features implemented elsewhere which were worth a mention:

Timeline Example: I thought this timeline from a New York Times graphic is much better than the timeline in Google Earth:
  • Easier to grab and move the jaws, in GEarth the jaws are too small
  • The play button only allows the jaws to move together, in GEarth you can press play and the far side of the jaws will move which is too complex for users to understand and utilise IMHO
  • The time labels are simple and clear whereas in GEarth the labels are more fussy
  • The blue shading communicates ‘this is the time range’ in a clear way and its semi transparent so you can see the graph below it.
The GEarth timeline remains high on my list of things Google should really fix in GEarth.
Tour Example: I think the tour feature of GEarth is one of its strongest features allowing user in presentations or promotional film clips. I came across a film sequence in a TED talk which has a form remarkably like a tour:
(BTW the clip is fascinating and well worth watching in full)
The clip ‘zooms’ down from large to small scale and at the destination scale the camera moves around a 3D object which is then manipulated in various ways to illustrate the relationships of neurons. Compare it with this GEarth tour:

The building clip has a poor frame rate and the building isn’t manipulated in some way (like showing the inside rooms) but otherwise, the format is exactly the same. I’m in the middle of researching to best design tours at the moment and the Seung clip is a lovely illustration of how the results of my studies will not just apply to GEarth and other Virtual Globes but to any 3D visualisation system where zooming across scales in a film clip is important.

With the Seung clip I defined where it should start, see how to get a YouTube video to start where you want it.

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Next Climate Change Talk

Here’s the latest release from a series of climate change talks I’m doing, this one discusses the Gulf Oil spill, the Athabasca Oil Sands and climate change:

Unlike the earlier ‘Is the Earth a Super Organism’ talk I’ve released so far in this series, this one is completely based in GEarth. It’s 10th in the series but I’ve released it early as:
  • The spill is still ongoing
  • I wanted to have a go at a talk completely in Google Earth to showcase my ideas of what a well designed tour should be like.
I’ve made a Prezi to link to other resources beyond the scope of the talk:
Good Design Points: A few reasons I think this is a well designed tour:
  • The tour covers views across a range of scales, this is where a tour really beats a traditional PowerPoint presentation
  • Simple Flights: The flights between segments are simple and fairly slow to give users chance to process the movement and work out where they are being taken.
  • Scale: I included Nelson’s column, the outline of Great Britain (twice) and a 5 mile long at various points to fix a sense of scale. GEarth is very good at helping users grasp the scale of things.
  • Annotations: I use lots of annotations to draw the user’s eye to the correct part of the screen.
  • Dateline: Because the inbuilt GEarth dateline is too small I included a custom dateline indicator.
Things I’d like to fix:
  • Dateline is too small: I fell into the classic trap of looking at GEarth on a large screen then reducing down to a 640 wide movie clip – you can’t read the text easily.
  • Audio Hiccups: There are a few audio hiccups that I’d like to fix but these aren’t easy in Camtasia without affecting the video. I’ve got to get a better mic too….
  • Better Images: There are a ton of better images I’d have liked to have used but I haven’t got the time to ask permission. Every image used is cc marked and that limits choice.

Work Flow: To produce it I imported models, images, overlays etc. into GEarth then I recorded a tour visiting all the locations as I wanted. Using the pro version of GEarth, I then recorded a silent movie of the tour which I imported into Camtasia. Within Camtasia I added the audio section by section, using freeze frames to extend the movie where needed and cutting footage to fit the commentary. I also added ‘call outs’ the red annotations which work in addition to annotations I’ve added in Google Earth. Its not an elegant technique but it avoids issues to do with GEarth tours such as not being able to review changes easily and needing to edit kml code rather than use the Camtasia graphic interface.

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Google Earth 5.2 Thoughts

Sorry for lack of posts last week, my family is over from New Zealand so I took some time out.

GE 5.2 has already been reviewed well by Mickey and Stephan, I share their enthusiasm for the tracks, elevantion and slide in browser functionality. I’ve noticed some other features in the 5.2 Pro version (not sure if they’re in the normal version) that IMHO deserve comment:
Table: (Tools > Table) This gives you a table view of the KML that you’ve selected in the places column so you can see the text in the description boxes of a number of placemarks at once, its similar in functionality to Northgates KML editor. Table isn’t documented anywhere I can find and I was disappointed to find its read only, it really would be useful if you could use it to write to KML directly as per GIS tools and the Northgates tool.
GE gives you the ability to produce KML within the editor already but I’d love to see functionality where I could put time tags into KML without having to copy raw KML out to a text file.
Regionate: This is documented to a degree but it didn’t tell me exactly what this functionaility does, e.g. it doesn’t chop up paths into smaller segments. Maybe it only deals with placemarks?
I was also excited to see a contextual help button in the dialogue box. Contextual help in GE is something I’ve advocated before so I was disappointed to find its only in the Regionate and flight simulator dialogue box (given a cursory hunt around). Why not link to help files from all dialogue boxes?
Slide in Browser: Stephan makes a nice point about the slide in browser, I agree with him that maintaining the option of the split screen would be good. However, I think that the sliding browser screen would be excellent for using GE in presentations, set up a tour, fly into an area in GE then pan across a presentation slide in a browser from the web, use that to support your talk for a while then return to GE to continue the tour. I think Google should think about linking the Google Docs presentation tool with Google Earth in this way, I played around with the idea but currently:
  • It takes 2 clicks to open a presentation (open balloon, select link)
  • Opening a GDocs presentation in the GE browser currently crashes GE pro!
Polygons and Ruler: I was pleased to see that the polygon bug has been fixed, that was a real pain. Being able to save paths produced with the ruler tool is also smart.

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