Annotation Icons

An annotation icon that is 256 pixels square and has a transparent background

The SOS Remote app, through the annotation feature, gives presenters the ability to draw on the sphere and place icons on the sphere. The SOS Remote app comes with a set of default icons, or you can create custom icons for your site.

If you would like to create your own icons, use a transparent PNG with a minimum resolution of 256x256, as shown here. Custom icons can either be attached to specific datasets, or made available for all datasets in the default icon library.

Dataset Specific Icons

To add an icon to your dataset’s playlist.sos file so that it shows up in the Icons dialog when you load the dataset, simply add an icons = value attribute/value pair to the dataset’s playlist.sos file and place the icon in the dataset directory. Note that you can specify more than one icon by making a comma separated list with no spaces.

name = Blue Marble (23 degree tilt)
data = 4096.jpg
category = land
icons = satellite.png,rocket.png

In this example, two icons have been added to the Blue Marble playlist.sos file: satellite.png and rocket.png.

In this case, the icon files should be placed in the same directory as the playlist.sos file. In other words, use relative paths when specifying the icons in the playlist.sos file. Once you load the dataset on SOS and then open the Icons dialog, the two icons you added will appear at the top of the list of available icons.

Another way to specify an icon is via the presentation playlist located in the sosrc directory. You specify the icons = value attribute/value pair for a clip here as well, however, the pathname of the icon file must be specified relative to the location of the clip’s playlist.sos file.

# Loggerhead Sea Turtle Tracks
include = /shared/sos/media/oceans/LoggerheadSeaTurtleTracks/playlist.sos
icons = ../../site-custom/turtle.png

Paths to icons are relative to the location of the playlist.sos file. This example shows how to add an icon that's in your site-custom folder relative to the location of the Loggerhead Sea Turtle dataset's playlist file.

General Icons

Finally, if you have a general set of icons that you create and that your site may use often, you can add these icons to the default icon library so that they are automatically available with every dataset. To do this, simply add your icons to the directory /shared/sos/etc/AnnotationIcons/.