All posts by Stefan Geens

Opinion

Bill Gates is spending on 3D globes too

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DCCCafe Weekly reports on Bill gates’ vision for the future, and it contains some intriguing tidbits relevant to 3D virtual globes. (Sourcing is not clear in the article as to when and how Gates’s opining was recorded):

Gates explained his vision of a 3D future as the ability to access distant places from your living room: “You’ll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise,” he said. “Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”

In fact, according to Gates, Microsoft is already spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to create a photorealistic 3D map of the whole world in which we can all interact.

…

It seems that Google and Microsoft are on to the same thing. They want to make it so your web surfing experience is focused to a geographical location. That way, we can get the benefits of both the web and real life ÇƒÏ the web has the ability to take you anywhere instantaneously, and real life is, wellǃ∂ real.

So are we now looking at three contenders for next-generation browser? I wonder what Microsoft’s will be called, now that obvious candidates “Explorer” and “Earth” are taken.

Content

Track the Götheborg sailing ship in Google Earth

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One of the world’s largest wooden sailing ships is also the newest. The Swedish ship G√∂theborg is a replica of a ship that sailed the trade routes from Europe to Asia over 250 years ago. A few weeks ago, after sea trials, it set sail from Gothenburg on a two-year voyage that will retrace the route of its predecessor. You can read more about the G√∂theborg here, or visit its website here.

Here is what the planned route looks like:

2004_08_24_Route_Map_M_S.gif

Now Andreas Petterson has created a script that does something quite clever: It scrapes the ships’s “blogbook” for coordinates on a daily basis, which it then uses to update a network link that contains the exact route of the G√∂theborg so far. Andreas also uses the coordinates to take a daily screenshot of the position as seen in Google Earth, which he then posts online. You can get the link and see the screenshot on this page.

Content

Google Earth spotting

Washington Post: Kurds Reclaiming Prized Territory In Northern Iraq

Inside the house where Sultan is living temporarily, schematic drawings of the new subdivisions are taped to a wall next to a Google Earth satellite image of the village, printed from a friend’s computer. On a desk are files on the 200 families who plan to move into the village and a party directive titled: “Instructions Related to Building Homes for the Resettlement of IDPs,” or internally displaced people.

Uncategorized

ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer screenshots

The info page is up. Ooh. Ah.

Some more benefits to having two major players in the Earth browsing space:

1) More features. If, as Darren Cope says, ArcGIS can do basic GIS analysis, Google Earth will have to catch up, perhaps by unleashing features from the Plus version.

2) Less leverage for governments upset at what these viewers show. That’s because the pandora’s box of satellite imagery delivered by the internet just got opened a whole lot wider.

The problem that Thailand, South Korea and India have had with Google Earth rest upon three facts being the case: The existence of high-resolution imagery, the existence of 3D viewers for this data, and the existence of the internet as a delivery mechanism. All three have long been around. It was only a matter of time before costs would come down to such an extent that Google could offer it for free. Now ESRI appears to be doing the same.

But while Google is expected to make its money from ads and upselling to the Plus and Pro versions, how will ESRI pay the bills?

I suspect it is going to use the Adobe PDF model and actually see ArcGIS as a cost center. ArcGIS Explorer can natively show stuff made and served by ESRI products such as ArcIMS, ArcWeb and ArcGIS server, whereas Google Earth first needs their output converted to KML. Knowing that work produced and served using ESRI tools can be viewed for free in an ESRI browser anywhere should be an incentive to buy more ESRI stuff.

Finally, if both ESRI and Google start showing Taiwan as Taiwan and the Line of Control between Pakistan and India, what are India and China going to do? Boycott Google searches and ESRI software?

[Update 11.04 UTC: Another screenshot at Phantom planet.]

[Update 2005-10-31, 11.02 UTC: David Maguire, from ESRI, elaborates on the business model:

Uncategorized

Maplandia.com: A Google Maps/Earth hybrid

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Martin Frohlich from Maplandia has just brought his new mapping site to my attention.

There are other sites that let you search for the world’s place names. Some of them even link the result to Google Earth. But none that I have seen do such a thorough and seamless job of using Google Maps and linking to Google Earth. Add to that a whole raft of features and usability functions, and the whole is quite impressive.

First off, there are extra layers on the Google Maps, such as country border outlines. There is also extra context, such as links to neighboring countries and their places. You can search places, or browse locations by country, and in every case there is a Google Map handy. If you drill down to a specific place, there is a link to Google Earth.

One thing I particularly like about it is that appending a country name to the maplandia.com URL gets you there right away. That’s simply the fastest way to get an instant map of, say, Colombia that I know of. Another nice touch is that maplandia goes out of its way to offer you the ability to search its database from other sites.

Process

Geotagging blogs

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Mikel Maron’s Brain Off blog led me to Zoran Kovacevic and his recent spurt of work converging georeferenced syndicated content with Google Earth.

First up, he posts about an XSL transformation he’s written, RSS2 Google Earth (get it?) that takes an RSS2 feed enhanced with geotags and pumps out a network link for Google Earth. Hopefully, news organizations will soon all tag their RSS feeds with the W3C geo vocabulary, so that converters which turn them into KML will no longer have to guess from the content. This is the future for syndicated content about places.

Then Zoran gets to work on integrating geotags into Serendipity, an open source blog content management system. He’s written a plugin that lets you enter coordinates for a post, and which then publishes them to the blog, links them to Google Maps and includes them into the RSS feed. He’s got a demo running.

Seamlessly connecting blog posts to a location is going to be the next step in collaborative georefencing. We already do it with pictures using Flickr and Panoramio, so why not restaurant reviews, travel posts and diary entries? Such items are greatly enhanced by a link to the actual place coordinates they reference. In this sense, there is little difference between news stories and blog posts — if it’s about a place, the most natural way to search for it is by location. (This is why Google bought Keyhole, of course.)

While we’re on the topic, Grasshoppermind makes the same point, and also underscores the importance of a datestamp for georeferenced content, so that future browsers can chart our creative outpourings not just in space but also on a timeline.

I’ve written before about how I’m waiting for blog tools to get good enough to let us georeference posts, so that we can browse them in Google Earth. Zoran’s tools move us a big step in the right direction. He also inspired me to go check out recent work with plugins for Movable Type, my blog authoring software of choice. And lo, there finally seems to be a plugin Movable Typists have long been waiting for: Customfields. This turns the task of georeferencing blog posts on Movable Type from a programming job to a templating job, and that is something I am definitely up to. Perhaps not this weekend, but soon.