Mike W’s Blog

Man, Furman campus is beautiful in the spring. I’ve been experimenting with a handheld device (ipaq 6900 series) that EES professor Suresh Muthukrishnan has been using in class. It has built-in GPS, so I went out and snapped a few pictures this morning. It was great to have an excuse to walk around campus in the cool air. The latitude and longitude are geocoded into the picture when the GPS is on, so I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a google earth file (kml or kmz) to show a virtual tour of where I’d been. It looks like Google Earth Pro can rip the geocoding information from the picture and create the file, but I can’t spring for the pro version yet.

Instead I used a program called RoboGeo to create the kml file. It looks like the program is very useful if you don’t have a GPS built into your camera as well. It did a good job creating a path from a series of photos. Check out the picture tour in Google Earth.

In the ‘Places’ window of Google Earth you have to open the ‘routes’ folder and click ‘path’. You can see that it just connects the dots and shows me swimming or boating out to the bell tower

The trial version throws an error into the latitude and longitude value, so I had to override those manually. That’s why the images are attached where the object is rather than where I was standing when I took the picture. The full version will geocode from the photographer’s location with no kml editing necessary.

I think you’ll also see why I did poorly in photography class.

mapmyrun.com is a really cool website for runners. It allows you to map your run using Google Maps / Google Pedometer technology, determine distance , share your route with others, and save the route with your profile. You can also put in your time, height, weight, etc.., and it will calculate your pace and calories burned.

If you’re running with a GPS unit, you can upload the data to mapmyrun, and it will automagically map your route. I don’t run with a GPS, so I haven’t tested it yet, but that would save some time.

Another nice feature is that the site will automatically create a kmz file, so if you have Google Earth and open this file, your route is mapped in Google Earth. Here’s my route from Furman to the North Greenville YMCA in mapmyrun and the kmz file for Google Earth.

And to think, I used to get in my car and use the odometer to gauge a route. How early 2000! Now if they could only add a feature that would map the location of ankle biting little dogs, and it would be perfect!

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. To demo the timeline animation and wikipedia features new to Google Earth (see my earlier post)

Check out the very amateur demo below. My apologies for the hushed tones. You may need to turn up the volume. Everyone in my house was still sleeping . Viewing the video requires at least Flash Player 8. The latest and greatest Flash Player can be found here. I need to explore more elegant ways for detecting the user’s player version, so I’m going to go back to this article soon.

In the meantime a link to the .mov file is included too in case you have trouble with the swf version. Please let me know via comment if you can’t see or hear the embedded video below.

It would be really interesting if you could combine the wikipedia and timeline features of Google Earth. For example, a user could tag a wikipedia article with geographic coordinates and date information, so that a user could get time-specific information while traversing the timeline. Perhaps placemarkers are more appropriate. I need to learn more - just thinking out loud.

The 3D view of Mt. St. Helens is just plain cool!

2. To prompt me to experiment with iShowU for screen recording and conversion of the movie files it creates to swf for a, perhaps, more web-friendly approach

Tim Lauer blogged about using iShowU as a Mac alternative for Snapz, so as a newly converted Mac user, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to see if I could generate an swf from the created movie like Camtasia does automatically (only for the PC - sigh) . After taking care of some minor edits in iMovie, I was ready to experiment.

This article on converting video to swf from Adobe was very helpful. We have Flash in-house, so it made sense to try it with that. I still have some learning to do, but the process wasn’t too bad. I want to get rid of the dead space above and below the capture, and I sound like I’m talking into a tin can after the conversion to an swf.

I learned that the swf autoplays automatically, even if you set params in the html object tag. I had to take care of that setting in the flash file itself, setting the movie component autoplay parameter to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some time in the future!

You essentially have 3 files you need to move over to the server to include the swf in your webpage.

1. The generated swf file
2. The generated flv file
3. The swf that presents the player controls to the user

Then it’s just a matter of including the appropriate tags in your html to bring it into the page. Dreamweaver makes that pretty easy, and the publish feature mentioned in the Adobe article also creates a sample html file that has what you need.

On the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor lists the top ten Google Earth time animations for 2006. Time animations were added in Google Earth 4 and are a great way to view data that changes over time, for example animal and human cases of avian flu (Declan Butler’s blog). Authors simply add a time span element to data in kml files, like so, and Google Earth renders a time slider bar in the user interface.

<TimeSpan id=”ID”>
<begin>begin date here </begin>
<end>end date here</end>
</TimeSpan>

The time slider is highlighted in a screen shot of the avian flu map below.

There are some Google Earth software limitations that were apparent when viewing Hurricane Katrina data. I wished I could have incremented the “animation” in hours rather than days. There are some great suggestions for improvement on Stefan Geens’ Ogle Earth Blog, so I won’t rehash them here. This functionality is a great addition to GE!