In our final week of Cartographic Skills class, before we start our final projects, we learned more about Google Earth.
Many of us look at Google Earth and Street View all the time, to find out how to reach a destination, or just for fun. It has a lot of additional capabilities that we explored with this lab. For example, it is easy to export an ArcMap layer or map as a KML file, which is Google Earth's format, and open it into the appropriate location in Google Earth, complete with out data from ArcGIS.
Creating a tour is also a very useful and fun aspect of Google Earth. You can create as many place markers as you like (those little yellow push-pins), then zoom from one to the next, and even zoom in close to see 3D buildings and landscapes and street views. Or, you can create a path, then have the tour follow the path. It will be recorded as a video, to which you can add audio if you like. You can then save the video and share it to be viewed in Google Earth.
Here are two views of First United Methodist Church, St. Petersburg, Florida, taken from Google Earth.
On the left is a Street View photo, and on the right is a 3D photorealistic model of the church. St. Petersburg is part of a Google Earth Tour made by students in Cartographic Skills class at the University of West Florida, April 2014.
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