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VISITview tutorial

June, 2002

Making portals

This page will show you how to use portals -- picture-in-picture if you will -- in your presentations. These are useful for showing multiple sensors or other geolocated information.

There are two kinds of portals:

  1. Georeferenced portals that are in exactly the same scale and projection as the 'background' image. An example of this might be using an IR image in the background, but having a portal of the visible image. Another example would be a 4-panel (4 portal, that is) display. In these cases, the instructor can cause the portal location in the image to be changed so that all views (background and all portals) have the Big Red Pointer aimed at the same geolocation.
  2. Non-georeferenced portals. In this case, the portal is exactly the same size as the portal image (so it is not 'roamable'). The software senses this state and prevents the users from trying to roam the portal images.

Here are the Ground Rules for portals:

Let's get started!
  1. Putting portal images into your lesson follows steps very similar to putting images into pages. Let's define our first portal.
  2. Next we want to use this portal in Page 2 of our lesson, so click on the View Pages button
  3. Now, select Page 2 by clicking on the thumbnail for Page 2 (if it is already selected, you will get a pop-up window of the complete image -- just click on it to dismiss it). Your screen should show:

  4. Now, let's layout the portal on this page.
  • Now, practice this by defining a second portal using the image files portal2-1.jpg through portal2-2.jpg.
  • Add this portal to Page 2 as well to practice using more than one portal.


    When you're ready to learn about using overlays, please click here.
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