M7 - Neo Cartography / 3D Mapping Utilizing Google Earth Pro

 

South Florida Features Google Earth Overview

This final module of Computer Cartography Involved creating a KMZ files within ArcGIS Pro, exporting them to Google Earth Pro, and then creating a virtual tour of South Florida and its major cities and metropolitan areas. I enjoy utilizing Google Earth and find it to be superior in showcasing 3D data that may be navigated manually to highlight particular areas. This platform is also more common to the average user and allows for complex GIS data and functions to be simplified and shown on a platform that nearly everyone may access.

Upon uploading and editing the raw data in ArcGIS Pro, I used the 'Layer to KML' tool to convert this data into KMZ files that could be transferred into Google Earth. Uploading this data was easy and effective. Utilizing placemarks allowed us to quickly navigate to areas of interest (AOI) during the tour and I also had great success in turning on/off the water and population features that were added to Google Earth. However, the tour itself was fairly laggy and glitchy, but overall showed the areas in great detail. I will certainly use Google Earth in the future for its stellar satellite imagery and timely updates. I find the tour feature to be useful in showing off areas through panning and selecting/de-selecting data. One hope of mine is Google Earth becomes more efficient in navigating from placemark to placemark, as this process was quite slow and could lead to the viewer losing interest in the recording. I will certainly use this app more often in showcasing geographic data and took more out of this assignment than I had initially anticipated.