Today we had a question from someone wanting to incorporate a visual portrayal of plane's cockpit dashboard with ArcGIS Explorer. The requirements were pretty simple, and didn't require actual "flight simulator" controls, and so we came up with a simple solution to meet the needs of this particular scenario using a display overlay, one of the map properties.

We've covered the use of display overlays in the past, most notably with a post titled Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience, and have featured some of its uses. Display overlays are PNG files that can be placed just about anywhere on the display, and are saved with the map. Subsequently if we have our own home server or resource center, the maps we use from those locations can also be stamped with any PNG we want.

In the example below, we've used a display overlay to stamp "confidential" onto our map:

And here's another example where we used the display overlay to add a floating legend:

For the airplane, we took a PNG file showing a portion of a cockpit and formatted it to fit our desired display size. We opened up the map properties (File > Map Properties) and chose Display Overlay. We checked on Enable Display Overlay, browsed for our file, checked off the image cache (not needed), and set the Screen Location for the bottom row, middle position.

To provide a full screen effect we hid the console by unchecking it from the View menu.

Here's our "cockpitized" view. Everything but what is seen through the windshield is the display overlay and remains static, while you can use the mouse and keyboard to navigate and view through the cockpit window.