ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Display Overlay

A cockpit view using display overlay

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:58:00 GMT

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.

Happy Holidays from the ArcGIS Explorer Team

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:02:00 GMT

The ArcGIS Explorer Team would like to send you our Season's Greetings in the form of a screenshot showing a snowy Yosemite landscape via a live Web cam seen from within Explorer. We managed to capture the sunset glow at the top of Half Dome the other day.

We'd like to pause for a moment to thank everyone for helping make it such a great year. The coming year holds much more for ArcGIS Explorer, and we're looking forward to the release of ArcGIS Explorer 900. As usual we'll be filling you in on what's new here on the blog.

Season's Greetings!

- the ArcGIS Explorer Team

The image above was made by using note results that link to live Yosemite Web cams and a display overlay map property. For more info and ideas on creating notes that link to Web cams and other content, see these posts:

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups (April 7, 2008)

Exploring the Collapse of Wall Arch (August 12, 2008)

ESRI User Conference 2008 - Plenary Part I (August 4, 2008)

For more info on display overlays, see this post:

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience (October 6, 2008)

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:17:00 GMT

One of the properties of a map is a Display Overlay, a handy thing to use when you want to stamp your map with a company logo or some other message like we've done below. You can learn more about this and other options under the Setting map properties Help topic.

But in this particular case we used the display overlay for something a little different. We were working on a map for a specific audience, and because of our presentation goals we wanted to hide as much of the Explorer user interface as possible. The goal was to eliminate everything except for the globe showing our data and a legend, and the navigator.

Normally the legend is displayed by right-clicking on a layer in Contents and choosing Legend. But we wanted the legend always visible, and eliminated these clicks completely by capturing it and creating a PNG file to use as the display overlay. We kept a small transparent boundary around our legend PNG so it would be placed out of the corner and slightly onto our map.

To add our legend PNG to the display, we chose File > Map Properties, clicked Display Overlay, and set the options as shown below.

This is how our map looked so far:

But we wanted to streamline our map even further. We did so by hiding the console (by clicking View and unchecking it) and also toggling Auto Hide Menu Bar (checking it on), as shown here:

We also removed the coordinate display along the bottom of our map by going to Tools > Options, and unchecking Positional Text under Map Display:

And here's our final map, with our legend always visible and our minimal user interface.

Happy Holidays from the Explorer Team!

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

We'd like to send you our Season's Greetings in the form of a screenshot showing a snowy Yosemite landscape via a live Web cam from Explorer (which, by the way, is using one of the new symbols included in this latest release, and the new Display Overlay capabilities to show the Season's Greetings message on the map.)

We'll be taking just a day or two off for the holidays, and would like to pause for a moment to thank everyone for helping make it such a great year for ArcGIS Explorer.

Season's Greetings!

- the ArcGIS Explorer Team