Archive for the 'Earth Browser' Category

EarthBrowser 3 Preview

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 4, 2008 in Earth Browser and Teaching resources. 2 Comments

The latest incarnation of EarthBrowser is in beta testing and looking really interesting. It’s not yet available for public download.

eb3

Earth Browser 3 is Flash /Adobe Air based, and in a number of respects will be a genuine alternative to Google Earth, indeed possibly a better classroom tool for studying certain topics, especially weather and tectonics. Here’s a quick preview of how the application is looking at the moment.

EarthBrowser is a delight to use, extremely intuitive and quick in operation. Expanded to full screen on an interactive whiteboard, the virtual globe is stunning. The navigation is hugely enhanced with a neat and attractive draggable menu:

ebmenu

The data sets include comprehensive real time weather information, tectonic plates, earthquakes, volcanoes, webcams and country borders. The Layers panel in Google Earth by comparison is becoming rather unmanageable - try finding the new Earthquakes layer without a guide!

The Placemarks tab adds several other data sets including Aurora Activity. You can also add your own placemarks. I’ve done this in the screenshot below, ading a photo that I took recently in Tromso:

ebshot
click to enlarge

KML files can be opened by dragging them into Earth Browser, and clicking names or flags in the weather window brings up a related Wikipedia search.

The Placemark menu includes the option to open a Google Map that tracks the Earth Browser view when panned. This is an important feature, partly because the Google Map will display a satellite view at resolutions that Earth Browser can’t manage.

ebshot2 The New Map window (click to enlarge)
ebmap2

I’m very excited about EarthBrowser 3 and will be eagerly awaiting the finished version. The USP for geography teachers is the clean and efficient navigation and essential real-time datasets. I notice that Apple are hosting some useful looking teaching resources for EarthBrowser here.

Add webcams to EarthBrowser

Published by Noel Jenkins on December 29, 2005 in Earth Browser. 1 Comment

Earth Browser makes a great backdrop for using webcams in the classroom. Although it comes with hundreds of webcams, it’s very easy to add your own.

Start by searching for webcams on Google, for example Antarctica webcams. Here for example I’ll add the camera at Mawson Station.

mawson cam

Start Earth Browser and click Options and Webcam list to open the Edit Webcam dialogue. Then click New, and select the country, in this case Antarctica. The Nearest Location drop down box alllows you to locate the webcam symbol accurately, though if necessary you can use latitude and longitude co-ordinnates. Add a title for the camera, for example Mawson research station and then paste the URL of the camera’s web page into the Webpage URL box. Finally locate the actual image URL by right-clicking on the webcam image itself and selecting Properties. Copy the information listed under Address (Internet Explorer) or Location (Firefox) into the Image URL box and then click Add to finish the process.

edit cam

The webcam will now be safely stored in Earth Browser’s database. If you cutomize Earth Browser heavily, you might want to save the settings (File / Export Settings) to a safe place, in case you have to reinstall the program in the future.

earthbrowser new cam

New Earthbrowser version

Published by Noel Jenkins on November 22, 2005 in Earth Browser and Teaching resources. 0 Comments

There’s a new version of the excellent virtual globe EarthBrowser.

EarthBrowser screenshot

With near real-time weather satellite images, sea surface temperature animations, hundreds of webcams (and the ability to customize the database) hurricane tracking and higher resolution maps than before, this remains a fantastically useful piece of software. It complements Google Earth and by virtue of it’s simplicity is perhaps the better classroom application for certain topics, particularly for teaching weather and climate. I wrote a short article about using Earth Browser in the classroom last year (link to article).