Google Earth Tours

Google Earth is a great way to promote a walk or ride in the countryside.  It enables people to take a virtual tour of the proposed route before they go out into the countryside to try it for themselves.  A virtual tour consists of a "fly-though" the ladscape at a set height above the ground.  It is possible to pause in any location, and to have a 360 degree look round at the view before moving on.  It is also possible to access images of the scenery that have been taken by others and placed by them on a photo image sharing site such as Panoramio.  It is also possible to add information that would help a person to undertake the walk for real, such as links to public transport information and the location of bus stops.

You can try a virtual tour by following the instructions below.  The tour it will show is a circular walk of about 3 miles starting and finishing at Pangbourne in Berkshire.  It takes in a very nice stretch of the Thames Path one of our National Trails.

How to Install Google Earth

Google Earth is a free application available from http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earth/index.html

Download the latest version of Google Earth and follow the prompts.   Norton PC security software (one of the leading vendors) classifies the download as safe.

How to run the Google Earth virtual tour

1.       The virtual tour has a soundtrack.  If you want to be able to hear it, check that the speakers on your PC are not muted, and the volume is set at a moderate level.

2.       Before running the tour, you must be connected to the internet as the 3D landscape resides on Google’s own servers, and other resources such as pictures are on publically available websites. These sites are, like Google, from well established brands (e.g. Panoramio and Flikr), and are again considered safe by Norton.  Once started, the tour will pick up these web resources automatically.  A poor internet connection may prevent some of the tour from displaying properly.

3.       You will also need to download the KMZ  file that Google Earth needs to use to run the virtual tour.  Click here for Tour v17 Folder.kmz  and put this file at a convenient location on your own PC.

4.      Double click the file to initiate the tour. 

Important Note (January 2016)

The Virtual Tour I created in 2011 no longer works as it did then.  There are various reasons why this might be (Google Earth has been updated in the interim and may no longer be backwards compatible, the KML or XML standards may have changed although it looks ok from that point of view, the audio file is no longer in the specified location, some of the settings may have changed etc).  The result is that the tour seems to be performed twice.  The first time it does a proper fly-through, but does not stop to open the descriptive content in the balloons.  The second time it just hops from one key location to the next and does open the balloon content, but does not do a proper fly through.  I have temporarily removed he link to the source (KMZ) file until I can figure out why this is happening, and get the whole thing going again.