Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Rotating and Tilting

Perhaps the most overlooked method of navigating in Google Earth is the technique of rotating the view by holding down the middle mouse button or depressible mouse wheel.

Give it a try. First, navigate to a favorite location in Google Earth. Press down the middle mouse button or wheel and move the mouse. Moving up and down tilts the view, whereas moving left or right rotates the view. Cool, eh?

This represents a very useful way to adjust your perspective of a location. In fact, this is how I always view an area once I have located it.

Learn more about navigating in Google Earth.

6 comments:

skyview5 said...

I have found that the new GE 4 rotate function to be a bit 'jerky' compared with the old interface. I have corrected this by clicking on the wheel but then dragging the mouse away from the wheel before rotating. This makes the rotation much smoother.

John said...

Thanks for the tip. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "clicking on the wheel but then dragging the mouse away from the wheel"?

skyview5 said...

I was afraid that might be unclear.

I am refering to the rotation about the viewing axis. If you are already looking in perspective view, but want to rotate the view to look from a different compass angle, you can click on the round ring to rotate, but I find if you simply move around the ring the motion will not be smooth. What I do is to put the mouse on the 'rotation' ring, but then drag the mouse directly away from the ring without rotating it. Then, when you do rotate the view with your mouse, the motion will be easier to control and more smooth. Does that make sense?

Sorry I was not clear before.

GregorS said...

Of course if you want the 3D effect (which has a great WOW factor, you must have Terrain enabled and set the height exageration (under Options) to something reasonable (1.5 - 3?). This always crashes my laptop's graphics so I use it spareingly on my portable computer but even the tiltied flat image (without Terrain) is useful...

jan.p said...

hi,
is there a way to move in the atmosphere as in a first person shooter game? I mean left hand on
keys: A,W,D,S (strafe left, move forward, strafe right, move backwards) and right hand on a mouse adjusting the direction of the move?

John said...

Check out the keyboard shortcuts:

http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/ug_keyboard.html