Sunday, August 22, 2021

Animated Street View Tours

Team Maps is a new easy to use application for creating animated maps of a route. These animated maps could be of a walking route, a drive or a guided tour. The route can include multiple placemarks or points of interest which can visited on the tour. Once you've created your route the playback options allow you to see the route being animated on a Google Map. This animation can include synchronized Street View panoramas (which show a first person view of your created route) or even a synchronized video of the route.

You can get a better idea of what you can create with Team Maps by having a look at the Featured Team Maps. At the moment this section includes n animated tour around Manhattan in New York. If you open this tour and then click on the 'New York Tour' link you can view the tour being animated on the map. As the animated tour of Manhattan progresses on the map the Street View window also moves along, showing you the related panoramic view of New York. 

If you want to create your own animated tour or route then the Team Maps Tutorial would be a good place to start. To create your tour you only need a starting point and a destination. Team Maps will then work out the route for you. If you want you can add waypoints or landmarks to include on the tour. If you don't want Team Maps to automatically work out your optimal route you can use a GPX file, a KML file or a spreadsheet to enter a predefined route instead. 

If you own a GoPro or a dash-cam then Team Maps makes it very easy to create synchronized video maps.Team Maps comes with a number of tutorials. One of these shows you how to create an animated synchronized video map using a YouTube video and a GPX route.

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