Garage Guy
Well Known Member
Many GPS units can record tracks of your flights. Then various software tools let you save the tracks, and convert them to .kml format for viewing in Google Earth. But using these tracks as a tour within Google Earth doesn't recreate the flying experience very well, because the current GE touring algorithm essentially assumes that you want to follow a sequence of earthbound waypoints.
So I wrote an tool that tries to do a little better. TourMaker takes tracks in a .gpx (GPS eXchange format) file and writes a .kml file containing tours that fly the tracks. It's not perfect... A GPS track is just a sequence of coarsely and imperfectly sampled 3D positions, and the other 3 degrees of freedom per track point needed to characterize aircraft attitude are synthesized in a simpleminded way (so the tour won't follow your RV through a vertical 8 very well
). Between track points, the tour display relies on GE's spline interpolation, which doesn't even try to model aircraft flight dynamics. GE's model of the surface of the earth will probably disagree a bit with the recorded track points (this is especially noticeable when taxiing.) Etc. But it's still kind of fun.
Downloads and more information at http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/tourmaker.
Enjoy,
--Paul
So I wrote an tool that tries to do a little better. TourMaker takes tracks in a .gpx (GPS eXchange format) file and writes a .kml file containing tours that fly the tracks. It's not perfect... A GPS track is just a sequence of coarsely and imperfectly sampled 3D positions, and the other 3 degrees of freedom per track point needed to characterize aircraft attitude are synthesized in a simpleminded way (so the tour won't follow your RV through a vertical 8 very well
Downloads and more information at http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/tourmaker.
Enjoy,
--Paul