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This past week I've been laid low by a throat infection whose bacteria responsible is putting up a fight against the antibiotics. I may need another week before blogging resumes. In the meantime, there's plenty of news in the excellent blogs in the sidebar, on the right. Back soon — Stefan
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ConnoteaSpherical displays - a reader question
A friend has been asked to make a purchasing recommendation for a large British scientific organization regarding spherical displays — spheres onto which you project video to display moving images of round bodies like Earth or Mars.
He knows of two, but was wondering if there are more on the market worth investigating.
The first is the PufferSphere by Pufferfish, a British company whose displays are also used at concerts and for art projects, but which seems to have a magical effect on children when displaying the Earth, as evinced by a video from this year’s Ocean & Earth Day at the UK National Oceanography Centre:
Pufferfish @ the National Oceanography Centre, UK. from Pufferfish on Vimeo.
Another is Global Imagination’s Magic Planet, which has a variety of sizes of globes, and can include a range of premade globe software, for example a version of NASA World Wind. It can be run from a PC. You can download a video from this page. (Not having embedded video in 2008 is a bit negligent, no?:-) And so is the 2004 copyright.)
I also found the OmniGlobe by ARC Science Simulations. It also offers a large globe, and comes with pre-installed software that facilitates the showing of planets and adding your own content. See videos of their globe here:
So the question to readers is: Are there other commercial manufacturers of such products you know of? Have you had any experiences with any of these? None of these three manufacturers are willing to quote prices for their devices up front, but my guess is that a big determinant involves the kind of content you want to display — if it needs to be custom-created, it will cost a lot more.
Links: Concharto, Bambuser gets a maps mashup, GPS iPhone?
Back in Cairo after a brief layover in Rome that was definitely Not a Roman Holiday. Here’s what I’ve been reading this past week:
- Concharto: The previously lauded Time Space Map changes its name to Concharto, and has been nominated for the 2008 Prix Ars Electronica in the digital communities category (which, er Wikipedia won in 2004:-).
- Map tiles as a KML overlay: It’s been done before back in 2005, but for whatever reason the service never survived: Google Maps tiles as a KML network link overlay in Google Earth, courtesy of Cristian Streng over at Mobile GMaps. But this time round, not just that tile is available — pretty much any map that is served over the web via tiles is supported: content from Windows Live Maps, Yahoo Maps, Ask.com Maps and OpenStreetMap.
- Live video maps mashup: Swedish live video startup Bambuser gets a live Google Maps mashup feature. The georeferencing is less high-tech than Seero’s, but Bambuser has the advantage that you can send video live from your mobile phone (which Seero can’t yet, and like Qik, which however lacks the mapping feature). Just missing the KML network link now!
- Second Life on the mobile phone: Second Life for the mobile phone is almost upon us! Vollee is the company behind that tour the force. But this also means a mobile version of Google Earth can no longer be considered a physical impossibility. Imagine adding iPhone-like touch-screen controls to that demo...
- Cool new KML editing tip: Richard Treves shows you how to consolidate style tags in KML created by Google Earth.
- Persian petition: Signatures for the petition Immediate and unconditional deletion of “Arabian Gulf” from Google Earth reach 598,615! Most signatories don’t seem aware that both “Arabian Gulf” and “Persian Gulf” are marked in Google Earth, with an explanatory note, but the petition text doesn’t feel the need to disabuse readers of that assumption.
- GPS iPhone?: So the 3G iPhone may include proper GPS positioning after all. That would make it far more useful for proper mapping applications than what the current technology provides (triangulation via cell phone towers). Geotagging of photos and geotracking would all be accurate to within a few meters. (Nokia N95 update — successive firmware updates to my N95 mean that a true GPS fix is now had within seconds anywhere in Europe and Egypt that I’ve tried... with a little assistance of a Nokia server that does the labor-ntensive raw GPS signal decoding). If the iPhone gets the same level of functionality as my Nokia N95, it will run rings around the rest regarding design and build quality. My N95 may be feature laden, but the build is is feeling rickety and the GUI is slooow.
- Google Sky horizon: a horizon for Google Sky — for any location on Earth, as a network link updated every 10 minutes.
- Sense of place: Ed Parsons looks at the latest version of Google Earth from the perspective of how it generates a sense of place.
- HoudahGeo updated: Mac photo georeferencing tool HoudahGeo (€25) is updated to 1.4.8, with “vastly improved Google Earth geocoding. Google Earth geocoding now provides readings of altitude in addition to latitude and longitude. It now also works when the Google Earth view is tilted.”
- JetPhoto goes geosavvy: JetPhoto Studio 3 is a major new release of a photo organizing and web publishing tool for both Mac and PC. It’s an interesting hybrid — there is a free basic standalone application, but also a PHP-based server component (not free). The standalone viewer reads GPS track data and generates Google Maps and KML. Worth checking out.
- KML for maps test: Fortius One’s blog Off the Map compares KML support by Virtual Earth and Google MyMaps. Elsewhere FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman updates us on their progress building a robust system for sharing and publishing metadata-savvy geospatial content.
- ArcGIS Explorer swipte tool: ESRI celebrated Earth Day showing off some features that other virtual globes can’t compete with — for example the swipe tool.
- Google Earth for Anthropology: I so hate giving money to Elsevier for scientific research that should be freely available to all, so does anyone have a backdoor link to this scientific paper: Google Earth, GIS, and the Great Divide: A new and simple method for sharing paleontological data? (Via ubikcan)
- Shocking: NASA World Wind developers and long-time Google-Earth critics “Bull” and Chad actually kinda like Google Earth 4.3 a little — lauding those additions I was the most lukewarm about.
- Late in reporting, but for the record: Brian Flood’s GETools is an API of sorts for Google Earth for PC. China satellite debris shown in Google Earth.
Sifting information from propaganda re North Korea, Syria
The UK Times of London has a breathless article about how North Korea is building runways under mountains, which it says was revealed by a defector, confirmed on Google Earth, and reported in the South Korean Press last week. Besides not linking to the the location in Google Maps (that’s so, like, 2004), the article has two main problems. One is that knowledge of such runways has existed since at least 2005 and was noted by Google Earth Community members then (note the date of the posting. Here it is, BTW:
The other is that if you go looking for the original South Korean article, it mentions the original source of the story to be... a Voice of America report last week, while the defector in question defected in 2006. All of which brings the timing of this news item into question.
The article goes on to debate whether the release by the CIA last week of purported evidence about Syria’s nuclear ambitions (which would have used North Korean technology) is meant to harm chances of a peace deal with North Korea (ostensibly at the behest of Dick Cheney’s “people”) or else is meant to improve chances of such a deal by in effect declaring on behalf of Kim Jong Il something he could never bring himself to do, allowing him to save face. I’m not sure. The Times has a botchy record on accuracy regarding the Syria raid and surrounding stories.
And in the interests of equal time, here is an interesting post on a Middle East blog I follow, arguing that the allegations raised by the CIA presentation don’t make sense...
{Update 19:54 UTC: Here is another tunnel airport, mentioned on Google Earth Community in June 2006.]
Syria reactor: CIA makes its case
Check out the presentation the CIA released today laying out their claims that the Syrian reactor destroyed by an Israeli air strike on September 6, 2007 was in fact built with support from North Korea and was intended for the production of weapons-grade nuclear material. Below is the embedded full version of the footage, courtesy of the BBC. Note the use of a 3D display program that looks very similar to Google Earth, down to the textured 3D buildings:
The CIA certainly pulled out all the multimedia stops to convince in this presentation. It is certainly a lot more explicit than the presentation by Colin Powell to the UN before the start of the Iraq War. I’m half hoping that they’ll also release the 3D model of the reactor from the presentation as a downloadable Collada KML file — just because that would be a really cool and innovative way to press their case.
What about the credibility of this presentation? Obviously, Syria and North Korea call it a fabrication, and given the damaged credibility of the CIA from their shenanigans in the runup to the Gulf War, those denials will convince many. But the BBC’s commentators appear convinced by the evidence.
This topic was previously blogged on Ogle Earth here, here, here and here. Download a KML overlay of before-and-after imagery here. The location is now also viewable in high resolution in Google Maps/Earth, as of the last update. You still get to see the reactor before it was destroyed, from a Digital Globe image taken on August 18, 2007:
Healthy Planet: Neogeo conservation charity
Mark Mulligan, Reader in Physical Geography ay King’s College London and prolific KML content creator, is at it again. On the occasion of Earth Day, King’s is launching HealthyPlanet.org, which lets “individuals and companies sponsor areas of protected parks throughout the world, choosing from more than 70,000 different parks or heritage sites in danger.”
The site won’t be fully functional until the end of week, but Earth Day won’t wait:-). By the end of the week, however, you’ll be able to use Google Earth/Maps to find and “claim” plots of protected parklands around the world by donating to Healthy Planet, a new charity set up in association with the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). Proceeds go to conservation projects.
Until then, you can read the press release; if you visit the site today you will find it in preview mode — no adopting of park lands yet.
Links (We'll always have Paris edition): Google working on supercharged Street View for Europe
Blogging can take a long time when you're on a Parisian terrace café distracted by the locals on a springtime weekend. As they say, Ceçi n'est pas un geoblogue:
- Street View coming to Europe (and more): Google Street VIew cars are spotted in Milan. Digital Earth blog points us to some really interesting intel on what the cars are carrying — lasers, which allow a true 3D model of the surroundings to be made. Paste a series of panorama photos onto this model, and suddenly we have ourselves the holy grail of 3D city recreations — one where you can “step out” of the Street View locations and roam at will.
- Autotechnogeoglyphics: Pruned enlarges my vocabulary with a word every aerial imagery aficionado should know.
- New Google Earth-based high-school lesson: “A Management Plan for Stonehenge: Real-world decision making” by Juicy Geography’s Noel Jenkins.
- “Google uncovers hidden Pilbara find”: So sez the Australian. It could also have been found with an ESRI tool, but I think the point is that it was found with Google Earth instead.
- Google Sky content: Google Earth Blog notes some new default layers in Google Sky, featuring video tours of astronomical objects. (More about the Celestron tie-in here.)
- What’s in a name? Mikel Maron on OpenStreetMap’s first naming war, over Cyprus.
- KML and HTML, cont.: Google Earth’s Michael Jones chimes in on his “KML is the HTML of geographic content” analogy that spawned a long comment stream on James Fee’s blog.
- Google YouTube fest: Seven how-to YouTube videos by geoGooglers, including some on KML.
- Search via visual landscape queries? It sounds too good to be true, but some Android developers are working on an app that will let you point the camera at an urban horizon and get information back about what you see.
- Australian models: ZNO Blog has recently come out of hibernation; just in time to tell us about a collection of Australian architectural models in Google Earth, courtesy of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
- GPS Camera: Altek announces a digital point-and-shoot with built-in GPS, to be released in the second half of 2008. (Alternatively, how about a GPS device with a camera?) (Thanks Jonathan!)
- Mapping Congo jungle villages: The BBC reports on the Rainforest Foundation’s efforts to map remote villages in the Congo.
whereyougonnabe: A review
Earlier this week, Peter Batty released whereyougonnabe (beta), a Facebook application that lets you expose your planned whereabouts to friends, and which lets you follow friends, so you’ll never have a near miss again.
In terms of functionality, it competes most closely with Dopplr, a standalone application with a Facebook module that has the same objective.
I already use Dopplr on Facebook, so it was easy to make a comparison. The upshot: Dopplr is simpler to use, while whereyougonnabe is more full-featured. Which you end up using will depend on your needs (and those of your friends).
In Dopplr, it takes no time at all to add a new “trip”. Just type a city, which gets recognized on the fly, click on start- and end dates, and you’re set. It is simplicity itself.
whereyougonnabe takes longer, but you have more options: Instead of just cities you can define addresses were you’ll be, instead of just dates you can define times, and you can specify the probability of the trip taking place. But you are forced to say what you will be doing there (you have no choice), so I wish it would have “travelling” as a default rather than throw a spanner in the submission process if I leave the field empty.
Dopplr and whereyougonnabe have different strategies when it comes to how you expose your future whereabouts. whereyougonnabe is a Facebook application, so your possible audience is your Facebook friends, all Facebook users, or just you (where you are told of serendipities but others are not). With Dopplr, you choose which other individual Dopplr users can see your trips — and if you install the Facebook module, then so can all your friends.
Where whereyougonnabe truly shines is what it does with the information. Dopplr uses the information of its users to generate a mini newsfeed of who is where — it doesn’t really leverage this information in geospatially interesting ways. whereyougonnabe, on the other hand, is literally all over the map: You can get a view on Google Maps with icons for where your friends will be, and the pièce the resistance is a timeline-enabled KML network link that draws your route and those of your friends, and keeps it updated.
whereyougonnabe’s visual representations work really well for me. To be honest, so does Dopplr’s simple newsfeed, as I am generally able to figure out myself that if somebody is in Ottawa and I am in Paris, that we’re unlikely to meet up. Dopplr’s RSS and iCal feed output is also very handy and fits into my exisiting schemes of keeping tabs on friends (Dopplr's feed in purple below):
Where I find whereyougonnabe gets a bit heavy is when it squeezes the geosocial graph for every last bit of info and for every friend: It’s too much effort to read for every user, for example, that:
[xxxxx] will be working at Health Canada, 70 Colombine Drwy, Ottawa, ON, Canada from 7:45 AM to 4:00 PM on Tue. You will be 3516 miles away, meeting at Centre Culturel Su�dois, Rue Payenne, 75003 3�me Arrondissement, Paris, France from Sat to Wed
I’d rather be alerted by proximity alerts than by a wall of text in which the meeting possibilities are hidden. The visual representations on maps and as KML cut through the clutter, but here too it would be cool to highlight close encounters via some kind of color code. At the moment, the home screen has a lot of clutter, which works against usability — Dopplr, on the other hand, subscribes to the “less is more” philosophy, which works well for me.
whereyougonnabe’s home page.
But Dopplr has recently also cashed in on an advertising agreement with an outfit called Mr & Mrs. Smith, and of late my every interaction with Dopplr includes some kind of exposure to luxury boutique hotels of the kind that I would never contemplate staying at at my travel destination. It’s an intrusive case of misdirected advertising, and as such comprises a sudden and rather strong pollutant of the experience. whereyougonnabe’s Google ads are far less intrusive, and very sustainable (at least to me).
Some more small stuff: I use kilometers as a measure of distance, not miles, and would like a setting to change that. In any case, precise as-the-bird-flies distances are not very meaningful, I feel. (And a beta bug report: accented characters need fixing:-)
Dopplr doesn’t lock itself into Facebook, but is independent of it, which is a good thing. I’m only using Facebook until something better comes along, and because I’ve been developing some mini apps for my employer, the Swedish Institute (Swedish Word of the Day, anyone?) to better understand the platform. Going forward, we at SI are commissioning a web application that is separate from Facebook, but which outputs via modules to all sorts of current and future formats and platforms, including Facebook, Flash widgets, RSS, email, iPhone... If a new platform reaches critical mass, we’ll have a new module built. I think this is going to be the ubiquitous development model for the next few years. Fortunately Batty knows this:
Our application currently runs on the Facebook Platform. The big advantage of this is that you don't need to re-enter your network of friends, you can just leverage the existing social graph that you have in Facebook. In future we will support other social and business networking systems - LinkedIn is an obvious target for the business traveler, and of course OpenSocial is on our list too.
I think that in the long run it makes sense to be platform agnostic on this.
In sum, I very much like whereyougonnabe, though I suspect its biggest enemy is going to be my laziness, and that of my friends. If it can simplify the interface, shorten the input process and perhaps offer an XML output option, then the superior map visualization features will make it a winner.
Google Earth: Atlas or mirror world?
Frank at Google Earth Blog is already doing an excellent job looking at and explaining the new features of Google Earth, and so is Google Lat-Long blog, so no need for duplicate posting here. What you’ll find instead is some more esoteric observations, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane.
The philosophical:
It occurs to me that the individual improvements that comprise this latest revamp fall into two categories — let’s call them brains and beauty. I get a lot more excited about the improvements to the brains of Google Earth, though I realize that it’s beauty wich turns heads, and which people “want” (or “cling” to ;-).
How to define those two categories? Brainy improvements improve the quality of the information that Google Earth delivers, or improve the efficiency of access to existing information — they improve the function of Google Earth as an atlas. Beauty improvements, on the other hand, improve the function of Google Earth as a plausible mirror world, an ever-more accurate simulacrum of Earth.
Atlas or mirror world, what’s the difference? Their functions are in fact poles apart. Atlases filter out as much as possible that which is not information or which obscures information. Mirror worlds, on the other hand, aim for the accents and details that provide a sheen of reality — precisely that which atlases strip off in the pursuit of clarity. Atlases try to augment reality by pushing high-information content to the fore. Mirror worlds do not.
These two functions can conflict if they exist in one application, and indeed I feel Google Earth is acquiring something of a split personality with this release. I’m not really complaining; you can turn off many of the improvements that are propelling Google Earth to its mirror-world destiny, but it is still the case that resources are being expended by the team on making Google Earth pretty, sometimes even at the expense of clarity.
I’ll explain, but I’ll start by categorizing the most recent release’s improvements into brains and beauty:
Brains:
Revamped navigation controls
easily viewable acquisition dates
Street View in Google Earth
12 new languages
Flash support for Mac
Beauty:
More and better buildings
New sunlight control
New atmosphere
I think most of the brainy improvements are uncontroversially brainy, but why do I regard the new buildings and the new sunlight controls as cosmetic? Let’s take each in turn:
More and better buildings: It’s true that the rendering of 3D buildings is now much more efficient, and that there are a lot more of them, but why doesn’t this constitute a huge informational boost? Because the satellite imagery already tells us there are buildings in those places; there is precious little else added by a 3D representation without metadata such as: Are the buildings residential, office, factory? Who owns them, when were they built, how high, who built them, how much was paid for them, what businesses are inside? Do they have websites, do they deliver?
A lot of this no doubt will arrive down the line, but until then, the buildings are pretty rather than informationally dense.
New sunlight control: When NASA World Wind got a feature just like this last year, I remember biting my tongue lest my critique be seen as partisan, but I did not really regard that functionality to be something that increased the informational quotient of World Wind much; I feel the same criticism now holds for the implementation in Google Earth.
The sunlight control is useful in one specific way — to see where on Earth it is night and day at a specific hour. But when it comes to lighting landscapes and buildings at sunrise or sunset, I don’t see the value besides eye-candy appeal.
First of all, the sunlight control is a bit of a misnomer. We’re not actually seeing the effect of sunlight: Buildings and mountain peaks do not generate actual shadows on neighbors when the sun hangs low on the horizon. Instead, we get shading as an inverse function of how much a surface faces a light source we’ll call the Sun.
Shouldn’t I be happy that Google Earth isn’t going all out for realistic shadows but instead is giving us a shading tool, which we can use to tease out terrain features? I would be if the light source were movable to ad hoc locations other than where the sun can be — for example, if I could make it revolve around the sky at 10 degrees above the horizon at locations other than the North Pole currently, I’d be happy, indeed. (Do go to the North Pole and try it, though. I really works, there.)
What I’m trying to say is that the current implementation falls between two chairs. It’s not quite accurate in terms of mirror worldliness, but is still limited in scope by its mirror-world aspirations.
New atmosphere: One place where I know I disagree with Google Earth Blog’s Frank Taylor is that I like to be able to see the little rectangular strips of high resolution imagery across the face of Google Earth when zoomed out, whereas Frank would prefer the look to be seamless and realistic, and prefers the zoomed out Google Earth to look just like the real thing.
For me, however, those rectangular strips represent information. They promise a lot more information if I zoom in on them, and also hint that there’s something there worth taking a high-resolution image of. I feel that this kind of information should trump a realistic view of Earth. And while the new atmospheric look certainly helps with the realism, it filters out too much of the kind of detail that I feel makes Google Earth useful when zoomed out. Yes, you can turn it off, but it’s turned on by default. I feel version 4.2’s atmosphere had a much better information/realism balance.
Priorities:
So what would I have prioritized instead of buildings, sunlight and a thicker atmosphere? Well: A projection that is friendly towards the poles; 3D bathymetry; better tour creation support; GeoRSS support; better search filters. These functions would all tilt Google Earth back towards the atlas end of the spectrum. Of course, that’s not necessarily where the money is. Google Earth is ad-supported, and nobody searches for pizza at the poles or in the Mariana Trench. And when Microsoft Virtual Earth does things like add lots of new buildings and everyone applauds, it’s hard not to want to compete. But that’s okay; in the end I much prefer a free mirror world with atlas functions than nothing at all.
That’s all the philosophy I can muster tonight. Now for the mundane stuff.
The mundane stuff:
Bear in mind that this latest version is still beta, so some stuff doesn’t work well. On the Mac, I’ve found the keyboard controls to sometimes lock up, even on a new install on a new account. If you’re using GE for a must-succeed presentation, best to stick to what you know works.
Another reason to ease into the new version is that the keyboard controls have changed. [On the Mac,] Command + up-arrow or down-arrow previously let you zoom in and out, but have now been mapped to the new look-around control. Zooming is now linked to the function + arrows combo. It takes some getting used to, unless of course you use the on-screen controls or a SpaceNavigator.
There’s one new preference item: You can turn off the new auto tilting feature that you get by default as you zoom in by right-clicking and drag the mouse up/down or using the on-screen controls.
Another subtle change: You can no longer filter the default layers by Core/All/Active layers only. Considering that it was a little-used feature that could generate confusion, this simplification of the UI is welcome.
One thing I think is a bit of a loss: No longer do we get a precise percent figure in the status bar showing how far along the download of current view’s imagery is. Now it’s a growing circular arc that slowly grows into a completed circle. Frustratingly, the arc sometimes gets smaller!
Turn on layers or placemarks in Google Earth, switch to Google Sky and you still get to see that content, floating among the stars. Surely this bug can’t be that hard to fix?
Small gripes, really. To be honest, I’m having way too much fun watching and waiting for the next move in the Iran-Google war of wills. It sure helps that Google has little or no business interests Iran, and that it still has a lovely concession up its sleeve: Offering to make a localized Farsi version that omits the Arabian Gulf reference, in accordance with their “primary, common local” doctrine. (Just don’t call Farsi Farsi:-)
Links: GE 4.3 out, Landprint.com, VE 6.1, KML => OGC
I have been (and still am) traveling, so have had to peck at the news in a busy news week. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve had to give short shrift recently (fortunately others have not):
- Google Earth 4.3 coming online: Download it now. While you’re waiting, read Google Earth Blog’s first impressions.
- Landprint.com: Order your own 3D custom-made prints of bits of the planet. $50 + shipping gets you 6x6 inches of a 3D relief-map. By a developer of NASA World Wind. Very clever.
- Satellites over Iran: UK’s The Times has a story about a purported Iranian long-range missile factory. With photos. A blogger goes looking for the spot in Google Earth and makes the before/after analyisis.
- Virtual Earth 6.1 released: Microsoft has revamped its map and virtual globe offering, to general acclaim. Digital Earth Blog likes the trees and overpasses. James Fee notes that Mac Safari web browser support means Virtual Earth is now in play for more projects with tough browser compatibility requirements. Mapperz shows how you can overlay ESRI Shapefile data in Virtual Earth. Leave it to me to point out there is still no Mac support for the 3D component, which makes the clickable but useless “3D” button that is prominent on Mac browsers doubly irritating.
- KML accepted by OGC as a standard: Google Lat-Long breaks the news. Upshot: Broader adoption, slower development, and not a surprise. Matt Giger doesn’t like the part about the slower development, while some GIS pros scoff at the idea of KML as the geospatial HTML. The Daily ACK muses on making KML a standard for the visual display of astronomical data as well.
Blogs linking in
NeoGeo Jobs
Recent comments
Did Google censor Basra imagery?:
Service announcement:
Links: SketchUp 6 forum, interview, user manu:
Service announcement:
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Recent Connotea bookmarks: GIS
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