Sunday, March 22, 2009 8:15 PM -
ArcGIS-Explorer-Team
Explorer 900 at the BPC Plenary - Part 3
(Be sure to view Part 1 and Part 2)
Continuing with his demonstration, Bern Szukalski opened another Explorer map. He explained that one of Explorer's strengths and distinguishing characteristics is that it can use a wide variety of data and Web services directly, in their native formats without the need to convert to another format. He also said that Explorer excelled at being able to use other, non-GIS content, like documents, photos, movies, and more, and place those in a geographic context where they gained additional meaning.
He explained that he had added lots of different kinds of content - GIS Web services, layer packages, local data, streaming videos, and more to his map - and would use those to showcase Explorer 900's new presentation capabilities. He explained that the presentation capabilities were ideal for giving briefings, for educators, and for anyone wanting to communicate geographically. The presentation was started at the click of a button.
When the first "slide" appeared, ArcGIS Explorer switched to full-screen mode, with just a few tools available for advancing through the presentation. But this is not a static "slide" in the sense of PowerPoint, but rather a "live" ArcGIS Explorer application. Bern explained you could click the arrows, or use the space bar to advance. Note the presentation tools in the upper left of the screen capture below.
The next slide looked just like a PowerPoint slide, and Bern explained that he had actually created it in PowerPoint and had simply added it to his ArcGIS Explorer presentation. This demonstrated the ability to easily incorporate PowerPoint-like slides and other overlays into a briefing using the new Explorer tools, providing an ideal combination of live data and navigation with informational slides.
He used this slide to announce the upcoming ArcGIS Explorer 900 early adopter beta program. The slide is pretty much self explanatory, but we'll provide additional details on the program in an upcoming blog post.
Like going to the movies, the above was the trailer for the feature presentation, introduced with the following "slide" (again, actually live ArcGIS Explorer in presentation mode).
The presentation was themed around federal lands and national parks, and used a wide variety of different data, including 3D data and lots of media content. We don't have room to show everything, but here's a couple of highlights.
The Explorer presentation slide captured below shows a zoomed in view of the Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. The ArcGIS Online topographic basemap is shown, along with a geologic map obtained from the NPS Web site and symbolized using ArcGIS Desktop (it's a layer package). The geology map has been made partially transparent. Note the title in the upper right, and the popup window containing the legend for the map. All of these can be controlled and toggled as part of presentation authoring in ArcGIS Explorer 900.
Here's another presentation slide showing a flash animation of the movement of the Yellowstone hotspot through geologic time. The animation was created by the National Park Service, and was displayed directly from their Web site in ArcGIS Explorer using a popup window. This is just one example of the many different types of rich media content that can be used in ArcGIS Explorer 900 presentations. Once again, note the title in the upper right, and also the popup window with the interactive flash animation.
