Development of dynamic virtual digital resources to promote use of the extensive April 30, 2021

Development of dynamic virtual digital resources to promote use of the extensive
           paved, snow, soft, and water trails in the Cedar Valley area
                                         UNI GeoTREE Center
                      Contact: John DeGroote, john.degroote@uni.edu

Final Report
April 30, 2021

Background and Purpose:
Google Street View provides an effective way of virtually exploring the world and can serve as an
exploratory tool for potential tourists or visitors to a city, park, or trail network or as effective means for
prospective students to discover a college campus without actually visiting in person. Traditionally,
Google captured Street View imagery from cars driving on roads but now sidewalks, recreational trails,
and areas such as beaches are added to Google Street View by Google and through voluntary
contributions from the public using increasingly affordable 360° cameras. This report details efforts by
the GeoInformatics Training Research Education and Extension (GeoTREE) Center, within the Geography
Department at UNI, to capture and publish 360° imagery along portions of the local trail system and to
build off those collections to build interactive virtual resources.

The work detailed in this report was completed from May 2020 through April 2021. The two main
objectives of the project were the capture and publishing of 360° imagery to Google Street View and the
building of dynamic virtual resources leveraging those 360° imagery. Both of these goals were
accomplished and are described below.

Methodology
The GeoTREE Center utilized their Insta360 Pro and Insta360 OneX cameras to capture 360° imagery
along sections of local trail networks, post-process this imagery, and to publish to Google Street View.
The general workflow was:

    •   Decide a trail segment to capture
    •   Visit that trail segment and every ~15 meters capture a 360° photo
    •   Create a Geographic Information System (GIS) line vector dataset to match line traversed
        outside

•   Post-process the imagery back in the lab
            o Render using camera specific software
            o Remove photographer and tripod from each photo using Photoshop
    •   Publish photos to Google Street View either manually or with an automated script and GIS line
        vector dataset

To meet the second project objective, the GeoTREE Center has leveraged Google Earth Studio to
produce a series of dynamic ‘fly-over’ videos that provide a highly visual pseudo-3D mapping affect and
also has developed a draft virtual tour using Google Earth Voyager that leverages the 360° imagery
captured in this and previous products.

The GeoTREE Center captured 360° imagery and video from an event (April Fools 5K) that was thought
to be taking place on the trails but actually was all on roads in George Wyth State Park. These images
and video have not been published but are available on request.

Results and Deliverables

        360° Photo to Google Street View

Figure 1 demonstrates trail segments for which UNI GeoTREE Students captured 360° photos both in the
previous project (blue) and as part of this project (red). Most of the photo collection for the previous
project took place during summer and fall of 2018 with some captured in winter 2019 in George Wyth
State Park. Most of the imagery for the present project was captured in summer and fall of 2020 with
some captured in spring 2021.

Below are summarized results of results obtained from the image capture and publishing to Google
Street View.

    •   360° photos captured along approximately 25.5 miles of hard surface bike or water trails in the
        local area (see Figure 1)
    •   360° photos captured at various point locations of interest including soft trails, downtown
        locations
    •   ~2350 360° photos published to Google Street View
            o The majority of images were captured in summer or fall 2020 but were not published
                 until April 2021
            o As of June 3, 2021 there have been 26,665 views on Google Street View for the
                 published photos

Figure 1: Trail segments for which 360° photos were captured as part of the previous project (blue) and
this project (red).

Figure 2 demonstrates how anyone could navigate to a section of trail by choosing the Pegman

          in Google Maps and dragging to a location along the trail network where there are photos
(indicated by blue photo spheres or blue line). Figure 2 is showing a section of trail near downtown
Waterloo. Figure 3 demonstrates the 360° photo for that location on the trail.

Figure 2: Dragging the Pegman to trail photos. Doing this opens up image seen in Figure 3. This is along
the trail segment near downtown Waterloo.

Figure 3: An example of a published Google 360° photo matching point above

Below we show some selected example screenshots of 360° photos along with the Google generated
link for that image. These are just a few randomly chosen links from images published from this part of
the project.

Downtown Cedar Falls Pavilion - https://goo.gl/maps/aLrajGvT4QBYbbaa9

Black Hawk Creek water trail - https://goo.gl/maps/tCsKezLArErNYxbt5

Bike Trail Evansdale – https://goo.gl/maps/8gi7EvNU1w2UPTvL6

Cedar River Nature Trail - https://goo.gl/maps/99ZGurUEAkewiyZbA

Gilbertville Depot – https://goo.gl/maps/4CqrNfVFKnFXa1SC8

Soft trail sign juncture - https://goo.gl/maps/vnsTqu1QYaSDfQXy9

       Virtual fly-through

The UNI GeoTREE Center developed two videos using Google Earth Studio to highlight the extensive soft
and hard-trail bike networks in town. These videos were produced to give viewers an understanding not

only of the length and breadth of trails but also the connectedness of the trails to natural areas and
parks but also the urban areas in Black Hawk County. The two links are listed below:

    •   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PiivEl4l5k
    •   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRNeYzO28bg

It is possible that narration could be added to these videos as well as other editing to improve them for
more customized possibilities.

        Draft Google Earth Voyager virtual tour

Google Earth Voyager provides a mechanism to develop virtual tours (like a multi-media slide show) that
leverage Google Earth and 360° imagery published to Google Street View. The GeoTREE Center has
developed a draft tour example that is meant to highlight the Cedar Trails network. This application (link
below) should be considered a draft and can be improved with input from local stakeholders such as the
Cedar Trails Partnership. A couple of example slides from the draft tour are shown below. The final
product is as sharable web link or URL and the draft version can be viewed at
https://earth.google.com/earth/d/19jzPHuqqxFiBCTbaxEaMVyw18o5lmVB6?usp=sharing.

Conclusion, student involvement, and future:

This project has led to a variety of deliverables including ~2350 360° photos of the local trail network
being added to Google Street View as well as some dynamic multi-media mapping and visualization
products that could be used in various ways for trail promotion.

Numerous UNI students gained valuable experience during the project while working as student
research assistants in the GeoTREE Center. These included Paula Carvalho de Castro, Ryan Lange, Greg
Klocke, and Campbell Hoffman.

The UNI GeoTREE Center welcomes comments and suggestions to potentially update and improve
virtual tours and videos. The raw imagery and video are also available upon request.