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New Users For Curious World Maps
Amsterdam - September 11th 2000
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IWP/The Met Office use Curious World Maps for creating weather reports.
Curious World Maps is a powerful software package for creating broadcast quality still and animated maps for television, corporate presentations and the Internet. The system is designed for graphic artists to make highly detailed, completely customizable maps and animations of anywhere in the world extremely quickly.
IWP/The Met Office uses Curious World Maps to produce weather map graphics for their clients in the UK. The graphics for the entire weather report are created using Curious World Maps including map creation, zooms in to the focus area, animations of weather symbols, and transitions from one map to another. The software is simple and easy to use. The Graphic Artists have preset the look for all the maps as a style sheet. This then enables IWP to train their Forecasters to produce the final weather graphics themselves - both still maps and animations. This process gives all the forecasts a consistent look and feel regardless of who creates the finished product.
Curious World Maps includes built in vector databases of the whole world licensed from Bartholomew®. These comprise detailed outline data for countries, regions, states and counties, over 150,000 place names including towns, mountains and other physical features, rivers, lakes and roads. Genuine relief data for the whole world provided by the US Geological Survey is also included. There is also the opportunity to import vector information, including street, building and land use data in Arc/Info format in order to produce animated local street maps. Import of high-resolution local terrain data allows the production of extremely detailed local maps. It takes only minutes to create an animation from a spinning globe zooming right in onto a single city block!
The styles of maps and animations are entirely customizable to fit your house look. You have complete control over land and sea colors and textures, highlighted regions, use of terrain data, drop shadows, lighting, label styles, fonts, place markers and so on. All of these settings are saved in a 'Style Sheet'. When you want to create a map or animation, you simply select the style sheet that you want to use, set up the details of the map and go. There is no repeated design work, and consistency of look is achieved effortlessly. You can even create different styles for different programmes and switch from one to another at the touch of a button without having to replicate any work. The software also includes a large number of preset styles so that even the novice user can get going straight away.
Everything in the system is animatable using a full key frame system. Maps can be zoomed in or out, panned or rotated, details can fade in and out, text written on, region colours faded and so on. Animations can be output straight to video, or as movie files or sequences of images. Maps and animations can also be output in multiple formats without any repeated work - so a story produced for a news programme, for instance, can be re-used instantly on a news Web site. Total resolution independence means support for wide-screen and other output formats.
Users of Curious World Maps from around the world include: ABC (New York and Washington), The Canadian Broadcast Corporation (Toronto), CBS - KDKA (Pittsburgh), MYLO-ARTelier (Austria), NBC (New York), SIC (Portugal), TVI (Portugal), The Weather Channel Inc (US), and YLE TV (Finland).
For images or more information, contact Zoë Wilson at info@curious-software.com or by telephone on +44 (0)7958 500 979 (for the duration of IBC) or +44 (0)20 7428 0288. Alternatively, visit us at IBC 2000, booth 4.139.
Curious Software and Curious World Maps are trademarks of Curious Software Company Ltd.
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