Play, illustrate, export, share

Everything the player does, and where each thing stops. No account is needed to play — only to publish.

Playing

The camera flies between the places a story names, the basemap changes when a scene asks for a different one, annotations appear and animate, and captions come up underneath. A locator inset in the corner shows where on Earth you are, which matters the moment a scene zooms into a coastline you do not recognise.

Narration is spoken by your browser from the text in the document. A scene will not be cut off mid-sentence: the clock waits for the line to finish, then takes a short breath before the next scene begins.

Illustrate

Opens a list of every scene with a suggested subject already filled in, taken from what the story says — the scene title, falling back to the caption, then the narration, with the place name appended. Suggesting costs nothing and happens instantly, because the document already knows what each moment is about.

Nothing is generated until you press Generate on a row, one scene at a time. Edit the prompt first — a sentence written to be spoken over a map is rarely the sentence you want to hand an image model.

Pictures land in a corner of the map at about a fifth of the frame width, for the span of their scene. They are context, not the subject; the map is the subject.

Export video

Renders an MP4 in your browser, frame by frame. Nothing is uploaded. 720p, 1080p, 4K, square or vertical, at 24, 30 or 60 fps.

The preview on the left is a real frame from the renderer that writes the file, not an approximation — drag the slider to check any moment before committing to a render.

With Narrate on, the narration is generated as real audio first and muxed in. Because the audio exists before any frame is drawn, each scene is retimed to how long its line actually takes to say — which is what timing: {mode: derived} has always meant. Expect the frame count to change when you switch it on.

Share

Publishes the story to a link that plays for anyone, with no account and nothing to install. Publishing needs an account; reading never does.

What gets stored is the .ov text itself, written by the format’s own serializer — so a published story is still a GeoStory. The share page has a download button that hands the file over, and the page can be embedded in a lesson page or a blog post.

A shared story opens paused behind a play button. That is deliberate: browsers refuse to speak until the viewer has interacted with the page, so a story that started on its own would start in silence.

Sharing offers a choice. By default the link is unlisted — a slug is six random bytes, so the link itself is the credential and only people you send it to can find it. Tick Publish to the Gazette and it is also listed in the public index, where anyone can browse and play it.

Open .ov

Reads a story from your machine, YAML or JSON. The same file the QGIS plugin writes, and the same file this site exports.