Tours in Virtual Globes

The most significant new feature to appear in Google Earth 5.0 in February was the tour feature, it can produce eye catching and appealing animations as was shown by the Apollo 11 Tour which shows a model of the lunar module descending to the surface of the moon. It allows users to record themselves navigating around Google Earth switching elements on and off. The use of the tour functionality goes beyond exciting animations, it has important applications as a way of; introducing users to a larger data set presented in a Virtual Globe, offering an alternative to PowerPoint as a platform to support presentations and as a quick way to produce powerful visualizations for education purposes. In this talk I will explore how best to use to tours to present a range of spatial data and examine how the Google Earth tour compares to similar functionality that is appearing in other Virtual Globes and other 3D environments such as Second Life.