Discussions

I hope this hasn't been covered already here.  I did some searching, but didn't turn anything up.

I have a gps track formatted in kml (and I could probably massage it into a variety of formats or restructure the kml if needed.)

Basically I would like to animate a long track of gps points. I want to see this from a mostly top down view of the whole area.  I want to start with a blank slate and then see the 2d points of the track appear one by one so that you can see the track build and develop.

I'm *not* interested in a "fly through" mode where I mimic the view from the vehicle.  I'm not interested in manually manipulating the view and recording it as a tour.

I'd like to automatically re-play my track, have it start from nothing, and see it grow and develop over time -- while watching it from a fixed top down view that will contain the entire track when it is finished.

I've googled around quite a bit, and I see information that seems to indicate this (or something similar) is possible in google earth.  But so far I haven't found the secret.  I found a "whale shark" example online that supposedly plots the movements of a tagged whale shark.  I can see the entire final path, but I can't get it to animate like the demo suggests it can.

Any tips for a google earth newbie?

For the particular case I'm immediately interested, we have a tracking buoy attached to some debris that has been floating around for a couple years in the north pacific.  If you want to take a peek at the data I have attached a kml file.  It contains roughly 2 position reports per day for the  last 3 years and the drift path is really fascinating.  I'd really love to make a movie of the motion and condense it down to maybe 30 seconds.  I know this isn't exactly UAV related, but it's part of the same project where we are building a UAV to help find the debris in the first place.  Here is a top down picture of the route.  Junk that's floating in the ocean really gets around!

Thanks!

Curt.

15FXZ.kml