3 ms·

Google Tour Builder will be shut down in July 2021

definetheword 6y ago
At this point, we could take all G/Alphabet projects and have a machine learning model that predicts the next shutdown!
jfengel 6y ago
Well, they certainly didn't go out of their way to promote it. My first quarantine project (https://github.com/jfengel/opendocent https://github.com/jfengel/opendocent) was for a tour-guiding app (list of places on a map, show where you are, what's here, where to go next). Rather than make up my own builder, a bit of Googling turned up Google Tour Builder. It was pretty clear that the thing had little support. Nobody seemed to be using it to make tours. I think its tours were intended to be taken virtually in Google Earth. I was trying to guide people in the real world, after having had frustrations with taking tours using paper maps. It was kind of an ironic project to be working on under lockdown. If I ever get back to it, I'll have to reproduce Google Tour Builder to drive it.
- panoramas4good 6y ago
  I think lockdowns have driven a high-level of interest in this type of technology, which is why I was surprised to see TC being shutdown. We're trying to reproduce something similar on Map the Paths with guidebooks, a fusion of user contributed data + OSM data + Wikipedia data to augment virtual hikes, bicycle rides, etc. Maybe overlaps with OpenDocent? https://mtp.trekview.org/guidebook/list/ https://mtp.trekview.org/guidebook/list/
  - jfengel 6y ago
    It does sound like the kind of tour creation I was lacking. If you can download your tours in KML, you could walk them in real life with OpenDocent. (I also implemented support for an ESRI ArcGIS format that did a similar thing. I found that ESRI has a similar "here's a guided tour" feature, but only because I happened to notice that my city offered it as a walking tour of historical markers.) Fusing the Wikipedia and OSM data is very clever. I picked Google Maps as the map provider, for no especially good reason. My next quarantine project used OSM, and it would be easy to adapt.

At this point, we could take all G/Alphabet projects and have a machine learning model that predicts the next shutdown!

Well, they certainly didn't go out of their way to promote it. My first quarantine project (https://github.com/jfengel/opendocent https://github.com/jfengel/opendocent) was for a tour-guiding app (list of places on a map, show where you are, what's here, where to go next). Rather than make up my own builder, a bit of Googling turned up Google Tour Builder. It was pretty clear that the thing had little support. Nobody seemed to be using it to make tours. I think its tours were intended to be taken virtually in Google Earth. I was trying to guide people in the real world, after having had frustrations with taking tours using paper maps. It was kind of an ironic project to be working on under lockdown. If I ever get back to it, I'll have to reproduce Google Tour Builder to drive it.

panoramas4good 6y ago
I think lockdowns have driven a high-level of interest in this type of technology, which is why I was surprised to see TC being shutdown. We're trying to reproduce something similar on Map the Paths with guidebooks, a fusion of user contributed data + OSM data + Wikipedia data to augment virtual hikes, bicycle rides, etc. Maybe overlaps with OpenDocent? https://mtp.trekview.org/guidebook/list/ https://mtp.trekview.org/guidebook/list/
- jfengel 6y ago
  It does sound like the kind of tour creation I was lacking. If you can download your tours in KML, you could walk them in real life with OpenDocent. (I also implemented support for an ESRI ArcGIS format that did a similar thing. I found that ESRI has a similar "here's a guided tour" feature, but only because I happened to notice that my city offered it as a walking tour of historical markers.) Fusing the Wikipedia and OSM data is very clever. I picked Google Maps as the map provider, for no especially good reason. My next quarantine project used OSM, and it would be easy to adapt.