How to Create a Google Earth Tour
Prepared by: Allen
Risley, Academic Technology Services, CSUSM
Google Earth is a wonderful tool for exploring the Earth
through the use of satellite photography. Many of us have used Google Earth to
look at points of interest around the world (or even into our neighbor’s
backyard). Google Earth touring is a tool embedded in the Google Earth
program, and is a great way to introduce an audience to information that is
geographically dispersed. The tours help users travel automatically from point
to point on the globe, whether those points are thousands of miles away or
right around the corner from one another. To date, Google Earth users have
create tours on a mind-boggling variety of topics – from a biographical tour
through the life of Charlie Chaplin, to a fly-over of the San Andreas fault, to
tours that follow the path of significant military campaigns.
Creating a tour is much easier than you might expect. If
you know the locations that you want to travel to and can right-click a mouse
you are most of the way there. Add in a little html language experience and
you can create tours that are annotated with photographs and contain links to
web sites. Follow the steps on this document to create your own tour and you
will learn some of the most important tools in the Google Earth Tour toolbox.
Navigation in Google Earth
Moving around in Google Earth is accomplished in a variety of ways.
You can access the Search widget in the upper-left-hand corner of
the Google Earth screen and type in an address or location. Type in “333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Road, San Marcos, CA,” click on the magnifying glass and Google Earth
will take you to that location (CSUSM). You can also navigate around Google
Earth using you mouse to click and drag the map in any direction. Once you
reach a point you want to see more of you can use the wheel on your mouse to
zoom in or out.
Google Earth (GE) also has navigation widgets that are
accessible on the desktop. In the upper-right-hand portion of the screen you
will find the shadow of a compass. Roll your mouse over the compass and it
will become visible. The “N” on the compass constantly displays the
orientation of the on-screen image to north. If you click and hold down on the
dot with the eye in the middle of the compass, that becomes a joystick of sorts
for changing your viewing perspective. You can use this joystick to change
your view angle of the ground, either to pivot right or left, or between a
top-view angle and a more ground-level perspective. You can also click on the
ring around the compass to spin your perspective around so that North is no
longer at the top of the screen.
Just below the compass is another joystick (with a hand at
the center) which can be used to navigate around the globe. Simply click and
hold down your mouse button on the joystick and you will begin to move around.
The slider bar below the two joysticks can be clicked or dragged to zoom in or
out from the earth.
Another way to navigate in GE is to click on the map and
drag it into place. Click at any point and hold down the mouse button, then
drag the mouse so that it “pulls” the map along. You can use this method to
move to your desired location. Double-clicking on the map at any point will
cause you to zoom in slightly to that point on the map. Finally, you can use
the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in or out from the current center of the
map.
Google Earth Options
Before working with Google Earth Tours you will need to set a few
program options. On the Google Earth menu click on Tools, then Options.
Choose the Touring tab on the options dialogue box. Tours will work well if you set the Fly-to Speed and Tour Speed to .300 and Tour Pause to
8 seconds. Feel free to experiment with these settings to find what you feel
most comfortable with. Also, make sure to check the box next to “Show
balloon when tour is paused.” If you send your tours to other users,
make sure they also set these options.
Creating Placemarks
Touring in Google Earth is all about creating, annotating
and linking together placemarks. Placemarks are simply electronic markers of
points of interest that you want to identify and save in Google Earth. To
create a placemark, follow these steps:
1. Navigate to your desired destination in Google Earth.
2. Click
on the “Add Placemark” button on the button bar (it looks like a
yellow push pin).
3. A placemark appears at the center of the viewer screen,
and a dialogue box opens up. You can click and drag the placemark to wherever
you want. Enter a name for your placemark in the dialogue box and click OK.
You’ll see that the placemark has been added to the viewer screen and is now
also listed in the “Places” panel.
4. You
can view information about the placemark by either click its reference in the
Places panel or click on the placemark in the viewer.
5. You
can adjust the angle at which the placemark is viewed. Click on the placemark,
either on the viewer or in the Places panel, then click and use the compass
widget tools to change the perspective. Once you have the view you want, right
click on the placemark and choose “Snapshot View.”
6. Google
Earth has created a brief video tutorial available via YouTube that takes you
step-by-step through this process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB1EseH7jzs
Create a Tour
Before you create any more placemarks, add a folder to hold them.
This folder will eventually become your tour file. Right-click on the My
Places outline item in the Places panel, choose Add and then Folder. This will create an empty folder for you to
save your placemarks. Once you have created this folder you can rename it to
whatever name you will give to your tour. Then, as you create placemarks you
can cut and paste or drag them into this folder.
Once you have created your tour and are ready to exit Google
Earth, you will want to save your tour. Right-click on the folder in the
places panel and choose Save As. Navigate to the location where
you want to save your tour, give it a file name and click on OK to save it.
You’ll notice that the tour file is saved with a .kmz extension, recognized by
Google Earth as a tour or placemark file. If you use My Computer or Windows
Explorer to look at the folder containing your .kmz file, you’ll find that it
is very small, probably only a few hundred kilobytes. This makes Google Earth
tours very easy to distribute.
Editing and Embellishing Placemarks
Once you have created your placemarks you may want to add
some additional information to the placemarks. Adding information to the
placemarks is how Google Earth becomes a very powerful tool for presenting
information to your audience.
Write Descriptions
When you click on a placemark in the viewer or hop to a
placemark in a Google Earth Tour, a description for that place appears in an
information balloon that pops up. You can add text to these pop-ups by
right-clicking on a placemark, then choosing Properties. A
dialogue box will display, opened up to a tab called Description.
The text you type in this box will display each time you click on the placemark
or access it in a tour.
If you want to format the text in your description, you can
add some simple html language such as:
· To make text bold, surround it with the <B> begin
tag and the </B> end tag.
· To make text italic, surround it with the <I> begin tag and the </I> end tag.
· If you break your descriptions into paragraphs, the paragraphs
should be enclosed with a begin paragraph tag: <P> and an end paragraph tag: </P>.
· A simple separator in the form of a line across the page (a
"horizontal rule") can be obtained by placing the <HR> tag where you wish the
line to occur.
· A numbered list can be created like this:
o <OL>
<LI>Open the door.
<LI>Walk out.
</OL>
Which results in:
o 1.
Open the Door
2. Walk Out
Here is a short list of additional resources for help with
basic html language:
· Getting Started with HTML
· W3Schools HTML Reference
· Idocs guide to HTML
· HTMLDog Beginner’s Tutorial
Add Pictures and Links
You can add pictures to your pop-up boxes. The example on the right
is a GE pop-up that displays a picture of Founder’s plaza on the CSUSM campus.
You can see that the pop-up displays a title, the picture, and the standard GE
“Directions: to/from” links. Just below the Founder’s plaza picture is a
screenshot of the Properties window of the pop-up. You can see that the
only information on the “Description” tab is the location of the image,
embedded in some html code.
Typically, when you create Google Earth tours you will want the
pictures available to all viewers, so you will want to use pictures that are
available on the web. If you know the web address of the picture you can type
the URL (address) into the properties box, add quote marks around the URL,
then add the html tag “<img src=” before the first quote and a
“>” after the last quote. If you don’t know the URL for the
picture but you can navigate to the picture on the web you can still add the
picture to your pop-up. Do this by going to the picture on the web,
right-click on the picture and choose “Properties”, then copy the URL listed on
the Properties box. Paste the URL into your description, add quote marks
around the URL, then add the html tag <img src= before the
first quote and a > after the last quote. Make sure to
provide a citation of the source of your photos if they’re not your own.
Links to web pages are pretty simple – just copy and paste
the URL into your description box and Google Earth will automatically turn it
into a clickable link.
Embed Videos
You can even embed video clips into your pop-ups. In order for this
to work, your video must reside on a website that allows streaming video, such
as YouTube. Look for a heading that says “Embed” and some
adjacent html code. You can then copy and paste this html code into the
description box of your pop-up and the video will be embedded in the pop-up.
Example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CpSW6AxlMEI
Check Out These Examples
The Paris Art
Scene, 1860-1940 – This tour is a good example of integrating images with
text, but with minimal formatting. All of the text is simply formatted and the
pop-ups are the default white background. If you want to see simply how to
embed photos, this is for you.
1906 San Francisco
Earthquake Tour by USGS – This “geographic” kml contains information about
the great earthquake, displaying fault lines and locations where damage
occurred. The embedded photos bring the tour to life, especially those that
put the 1906 view next to the current day.
Wild
Sanctuary: The Voice of the Natural World – Wild Sanctuary is an
organization devoted to capturing and cataloguing natural sounds found all
across the world. Their kml file is very professional – clean informative and
logical in its design. This file also includes sound – each placemark has an
embedded sound player that gives you a brief example of the natural sounds of
that location.
The Life
and Times of Charlie Chaplin – A wonderful example of a tour used as a
biography. This tour follows the life of Charlie Chaplin, from birth until
death. There are photos of important locations and events along the way, and
just enough detail to keep the casual viewer interested. A good place to start
if you want to design an informative and entertaining tour.
AntWeb – OK, this one can be kind of creepy if you’re not into bugs, but for you
biologists and entomologists out there you will find this very interesting.
This kml file contains placemarks for all of the species of ants catalogued by
the folks at AntWeb. It is a great example of taking a database with a
geographic component and porting it to Google Earth. Instead of ants, this
site could have been used to show ferns or volcanoes or movie locations. The
links in each pop-up to web pages about the individual specimens and species is
a nice touch.
On the Road with
Jack Kerouac – An extremely detailed look at the life of the famous beat
poet and philosopher. It’s one of the largest collections of placemarks I have
seen in a Google Earth file. Good examples of changing the bird’s-eye
perspective away from top-north and directly above, to make the flight from
placemark to placemark more visually stimulating.
KML
Samples – This file isn’t really a tour, but it contains a series of
placemarks that you can use as examples of how to create and format your own
placemarks. Very good resource for cutting and pasting html code.
You’re Ready!
At this point you now have enough information to create your
own tour. Be as creative as you like – all you need to know is where you want
to put the placemarks and what information you want to put in the pop-ups.
Have fun.