Visualizing data on a globe

Ever since the release of Google Earth, spinning globe applications are a useful and popular method of geographical exploration. QGIS has an experimental plugin called QGIS Globe that is similar to Google Earth; however, it is extremely unstable. In this recipe, we'll display a layer in Google Earth.

Getting ready

You will need to use the QGIS plugin manager to install the mmqgis plugin.

Make sure you have Google Earth installed from https://www.google.com/earth/.

You will also need the following dataset from a previous recipe. It is a zipped directory called ufo, which you should uncompress to your qgis_data directory:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/ufo.zip

How to do it...

We will load our layer and set up the attribute we want to use for the Google Earth KML output as descriptors. We'll use the mmqgis plugin to output our layer to KML. Finally, we'll use a cross-platform technique to open the file, which will trigger...