My Google Map Blog

Last month we showed you Paul van Dinther's amazing "A-tour" -- a nine-screen set-up that is an incredible way to view Google Earth tours.

To keep things running smooth and stable, the system actually shows various videos captured from Google Earth, which Paul loads ahead of time. The result is stunning, but building those videos has proven to be quite an effort. To help with that, Paul has created a tool called "TourMaker" that does much of the work for him. While building it, his system looks something like this:

The result is some very impressive tours, such as the one seen here:

Here's more of what Paul had to say about it:

A cubic spline is fitted through each location but also for each camera orientation parameter such as heading, tilt and roll. The result is a silky smooth camera animation that can be fined tuned by adjusting any of the 18 views.

A spline doesn't care how far apart each position node is so in addition to the six splines controlling the camera I may need a seventh spline that controls time but the speed can be controlled quite nicely by careful node placement.

Tourmaker is able to output KML tour data based on any duration and field of view. However, for A-tour I need 9 tour files for each display. For this the tourmaker can output a project file that can be processed by my existing proprietary tour manipulation software. Since all these are internal tools it will do the job.

The software isn't yet available to the public, but Paul is hoping to fine-tune it and release it sometime soon. In the meantime, you can grab this KMZ file to play the Grand Canyon tour for yourself.

We've seen a variety of great vehicle simulators over the years, from Ships to Aircraft to the A-Team van. A new driving simulator was recently released by Katsuomi Kobayashi and it's quite well done.

It doesn't have a ton of features, and is missing things like building collision detection (which is both a blessing and a curse), but has some really creative features like multiple viewpoints, working brake lights and even turn signals (seen below)!

It's the first driving simulator I've played with since the new 3D imagery came out, and that certainly adds a different dimension to it. The imagery itself adds depth to the game, but the roads in those cities are very bumpy and make it difficult to drive. Search for "San Francisco" in the game and you'll see what I mean.

All in all, it's a fun little game. Try it for yourself at this link and leave your comments below.

(via Google Maps Mania)