Could someone give me some information about whether Google Earth or Google Maps supports Multi - Touch or not in Windows? Where can I find the relevant information from?
It would be a good idea to let us know if you're talking about the full desktop Google Earth (ie. with the COM API) or the thin client web based app.
That being said -- neither versions support touch events natively. Both applications are extremely "mouse heavy" and do virtually all interaction via the mouse. You basically have to map all the touch events to mouse events and go from there. This isn't exactly easy, and requires a lot of low level WinAPI programming -- so it might be easier to get some overlay that does the mouse translation for you.
I personally haven't used the wrapper that Kevin posted, but it looked interesting -- so that might work for you.
EDIT: Kevin's suggestion uses TUIO, which is a pretty popular way of going from touch --> mouse events. In my experience this doesn't do a very good job for Google Earth though, which relies on your typical "mouse down, mouse move, mouse up" patterns ---- this can be done in TUIO, but the actual gestures to get mouse down/move/up actions are clunky.
-- Dan
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This is my first post, wooohooo! I've been using stack exchange when I needed information but usually someone had the same problem as me and I didn't need to make a post. Which means this website is really good.
Now turns out I have a pretty unique problem.
Please check out http://gaia.tru.ca/birdMOVES/
You will see a website with a google map. It is connected to a db which will be automatically updated.
The purpose of this website is to track how birds feed. There is going to be bird feeders equipped with NFC all over the world to track birds equipped with RFID when they feed.
I am taking care of the front-end, the web app for visualizing.
This is a work in progress so try not to care about the looks of it.
Apparently everything was written in RApache because the person who made everything this far is a Geography teacher(Not a lot of programming background, I had to refactor his code and learn R because it wasn't in my array of known languages.)
My client asked me to add time animation to his map. Feasible with the help of Google Earth.
I made the existing R code generate a tour. It works perfectly and even shows on my map.
Here is the address of my dev server: http://thelab.dyndns.org:1080/birdmoves/
You can see that there is an extra check box for time animation. If you check it, the tour will appear as an object on the map (no way to use it whatsoever right now).
So what I'd like to know is how do I make it work? How do I make it autoplay when the submit button is pressed? With standard google earth controls for rewind, pause and fast-forward. And independently from the google maps without tour?
This is intense. I have the feeling google earth isn't going to work because they deprecated all their gadgets.
I'm on the clock and I need help.
In case you were wandering what eventually happened:
We ended up making a hybrid website where the static visualization is within Google maps using kml and the time animation is within CesiumJs using CZML.
CZML is based off JSON and can be used very similarly to kml.
The api is also very nice, it only takes one line of javascript code to get a map running on an existing server.
To implement time visualization CZML supports putting multiple consecutive values for almost any property(like position, to animate movement, or even color to change colors) and takes account of time.
Also very nice, CesiumJs supports animated 3d models!
If you're interested http://cesiumjs.org/
It also has a lot of support, documentation and tutorials... etc..
It's being maintained by professionals. I really recommend it.
The Google Earth API got deprecated and will not function by December this year which is not a viable option for a long term service. So cesium was the only option for this specific project.
Cheers
I would like to create a webapp where I can display my own geotiffs, with NDVI and other data layers, as well as 3D geometries, providing a seamless rendering of both 2D tiles and textured 3D shapes, exactly like maps.google.com achieves in switching from "map" to "earth" views.
After much research, the closest I came to a viable solution is to build the infrastructure from the ground up based on http://cesiumjs.org/, and while this seems doable, it is extremely low level, and will require an exotic cocktail of libraries and a buttload of man-hours.
Before going down that road, I want to make sure there isn't a cost effective alternative that takes all the heavy lifting out of my app's shoulders and gives me a friendly set of APIs to base my app on.
Mapbox comes close to perfection in this regard, but unfortunately, it only handles 2D.
On the other hand, on the Google side, amid Earth API and Maps Engine deprecation, it's hard to tell what exactly is currently possible and will remain available long term.
Bottom line, for a future-proof Google-centric solution built today, are there Google APIs in place that allow building a webapp that displays custom 2D and 3D data with a seamless rendering experience?
https://cesiumjs.org/ is a library very similar to google maps that provides support for 3d shapes on top of maps.
I run the RPG campaign called Yarona: Darkness Ascending. I also run the site http://diebot.org/ and I want to incorporate what's found at http://www.uesp.net/oblivion/map/obmap.shtml using my own continents, but where do I start?
Ok, I admit, Frank has a good point, I didn't consider that the external link could go offline 3 months down the road, then my question looses key information. My apologies.
What I have is a campaign that takes place on the world known as Yarona. I also have a large, world-atlas style map/graphic. what I want is to have a Google Maps style interface so my players can zoom out to continents, or zoom in as tight as city blocks, maybe even include "Special Place Pins".
Depa suggests that I try to get help from Google first. I did try that. The only thing I found was about maps of Earth, Earth and more Earth. Depa also suggested I include the code I've used so far, and I would have done so. The thing is that, to reiterate (and please forgive me if I seem flippant):
Where Do I Start?
Hasn't anybody thought about creating dynamic texture of Google Maps? So for instance, we create a simple plane and apply a texture to it that is going to be an actual map of Google (with all of it properties, like drag, zoom, etc.).
Would be nice to somehow deploy google map to a canvas element, grab it as a map for Object3D texture, hide it and listen to its changes (mousemove, etc.) and update the texture map again as it’s being changed.
Hasn’t anybody implement this already? Or maybe at least somebody has some thoughts on how to do this implementation??? May be some alternative that I don’t know about?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that it would be nice to have Google Maps inside of THREE.js as a plugin or even as a part of library.
I have definitely thought about this and I'm not alone. You should be verrrrry prudent if you choose to do so, however: https://developers.google.com/maps/licensing
For student-ish projects you may be okay but don't be surprised if your game or real estate company gets a C&D letter in like 2 hours after release :)
Seems like this has already been done.
The Google Maps team joined with B-Reel to make the Google Maps Cube
Game, where you help a small blue ball navigate the streets of New
York, Tokyo, Paris and San Francisco (among others). As you move your
mouse the cube rotates and the ball rolls down the streets, bouncing
off buildings and making its way towards the goal.
No discussion on WebGL is complete without mentioning Mr. doob's
Three.js library at some point, and this is no exception: the Maps
Cube game makes use of Three.js for its gorgeous rendering. If you're
considering doing some WebGL work in a commercial setting, Three.js is
a really good place to start; it's a very nice library that will save
you a lot of headaches.
http://www.playmapscube.com/ (requires chrome).
I have an overview drawing of a plant and I want to show the important pieces of equipment. Each piece of equipment would show some description information and have a link whenever it is hovered over.
I want the whole thing to function similarly to Google Maps where I can zoom in and pan around.
I have been trying to get the basic pan and zoom functions to work in Flash but are there better ways to develop this? Maybe something that doesn't involve Flash?
If you want to go for a flash-free, google maps-free plugin, you can combine http://wayfarerweb.com/jquery/plugins/mapbox/ with some jQuery for the mouseover behaviours.
It of course depends on how comfortable you are using jQuery, the implementation of the map itself is quite easy (it has zoom and pan), and the hovers are not complicated but will require more research if you haven't worked with javascript before. The advantage is that you will have complete control over it...