Short news: Sim City, South Korea, Photosynth

  • SimCity aficionados are turning to Google Earth to ensure the accuracy of their creations… Sometimes you can practically taste the convergence.
  • Toponymic tussle: Asia Media reports South Korea’s National Geographic Information Institute “will hand over an English-language map of Korea to Google this month with a request that the U.S. Internet company stop using Japanese terms on the map of Korea.” Other organizations will get the map as well.
  • VirtualGlobes.org is a “directory to centralize the access to the various KML projects users came up with. Feel free to add a link to your KML project, KML tool, or anything at all KML or Google Earth related to the listing.”
  • The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) tries out Atlas Gloves, and posts a video . It works!
  • I kinda dropped the ball on Microsoft’s Photosynth, a photo georeferencing tool with a twist whose technology preview video demo is wholly impressive. Digitally Distributed Environments has a nice writeup, as does Search Engine Watch.

    I wonder if their choice of venue — St. Marks Square, an urban space — has to do with the limits of the technology. Trees and lanscapes must be more difficult, but so would photos taken of the same place over time, as new buildings are added. I suspect all of these challenges could be circumvented with some user-generated tweaking, though.

    Photosynth certainly looks like a prime candidate for inclusion in Microsoft’s upcoming 3D virtual globe — Microsoft principal researcher Rick Szeliski is quoted in the video saying “Once we can take all the world’s photos and organize them in 3D…” That definitely carries an echo Google’s mission statement.

  • Google Earth for Dummies, coming in December (Via Google Earth Blog).

One thought on “Short news: Sim City, South Korea, Photosynth”

Comments are closed.