My favorite $2,500 application that I don’t own, Mathematica, has just been bumped to version 7. New in this version is integrated Geodesy & GIS functions, brought to you with Wolfram Research’s usual obsessive attention to detail. I mean, look at this:
“Exaggerated differences between common reference ellipsoids and WGS84.”
As with every self-respecting application these days, Mathematica now also comes with geolocation-finding tools! And, yes, current & historical weather data for 17,000 weather stations worldwide, all ready for integrating into whatever mathematical analysis you have waiting for it. Country data (including a wealth of health, transportation and economic statistics) and city data is also included (since version 6), letting you easily find solutions to fun stuff like the Traveling Salesman Problem:
If you have Mathematica running on a server, you can create a web interface for your users with WebMathematica, letting you create Java applets that allow interaction right from the web page. The documentation doesn’t say, however, if this Mathematica 7 is compatible with WebMathematica, so it’s not clear if you’d be able to integrate these newest GIS functions into your web apps yet. [Update: The answer is yes, as per the comment below.]
If you’ve been waiting for the right tools to build a competitor to ESRI ArcGIS from scratch, here’s your chance:-) More seriously, well-funded programmatically inclined educators should take a look at what Mathematica can offer, as should GIS professionals looking to bring the full force of mathematical analysis to their dataset, beyond what desktop GIS tools can offer.
What to do if you are the maker of Earthscape, the first virtual globe for the iPhone, and long comes Google with Google Earth for iPhone, with higher resolution satellite images and a revolutionary user interface?
You figure out what your product has that the competition doesn’t, and then you reposition it, is what you do. One feature unique to Earthscape for iPhone is that users can take georeferenced photos with the iPhone, upload them to Earthscape’s servers and have them displayed immediately on the globes of all Earthscape users on the iPhone, as well as on the Earthscape web site.
Google Earth has Panoramio, but its photos are vetted and take weeks or months to appear on Google Earth. With vetting comes quality, but you lose immediacy. That immediacy is what Earthscape is now focusing on, turning it less into a virtual globe for the iPhone than a live georeferenced photo publishing tool that happens to use a cool virtual globe on the iPhone for context.
To illustrate this point, Tom at Earthscape emailed with news of pictures taken and posted by Earthscape users in the fire zones around Los Angeles. One user in particular appears to be a fireman, using his iPhone to quickly take and share georeferenced photos. Here’s how they pop up on Earthscape:
Press on a picture to see it in closeup and other related info.
Another positive development is that Earthscape now also makes a user’s georeferenced photostream available as a KML network link (link from the user page), so you can follow a georeferenced photo stream from your desktop, live:
While Flickr does already provide live KML for your photostream, there is currently no way (that I know of) to publish and share georeferenced photos in real time onto a map on the iPhone besides Earthscape, because neither Google Earth for iPhone nor Google Maps for iPhone lets you add KML files or subscribe to GeoRSS… yet.
G. William Skinner:This obituary of G. William Skinner (1923-2008) is a must-read for all aspiring neogeographers: A quick excerpt to whet your appetite:
A central and crucial aspect of Skinner’s thinking is spatial; he was vastly ahead of the GIS revolution in the social sciences, in that he consistently tried to analyze China’s social, economic, and cultural data in terms of the spatial patterns that it displayed decades before the corresponding desktop computation capability was available. I visited his research laboratory at UC-Davis sometime early in the 1990s, and was struck by a couple of vignettes. When I arrived he was poring over a Chinese census atlas in eight gradations with a magnifying glass; he was laboriously coding counties by the color representing a range of social estimates. And when he brought me to examine a wall-sized map he had produced mapping sex ratios across part of southeastern China, he was interested in pointing out how the values of sex ratios corresponded to the core-periphery framework mentioned above. I pointed out a small, bounded region in southwest China that appeared to be anomalous, in that it represented an island of normal sex ratios in a sea of high male-female ratios. He instantly replied: that’s an ethnic minority population that doesn’t discriminate against girls. Culture and space!
Sensor web weather report:EarthNC has new cool KML layer available for download that shows live ocean buoy weather data at 500 locations, culled from the NOAA National Buoy Data Center. EarthNC’s Virgil Zetterlind writes:
The Google Earth Buoy observation file is updated hourly and provides quick access to detailed wind, wave, temperature, and other observations as well as historical plots and trends. The new layer is easily combined with existing EarthNC weather and charting features for Google Earth including NOAA Marine Forecasts, U.S. Airport Weather Observations, NOAA Voluntary Ship Weather Reports, NOAA ENC vector charts, and more.
Virtual microscope via the Google Maps API: NYU’s School of Medicine has made high resolution slides available as zoomable photos via the Google Maps API. Advantages: If you find something worth showing to others, you can just send them the unique permalink URL for the view, like this. And you can add placemarks to the slide, explaining key features. What would be cool: Embeddable maps. I wonder if in the future, we’ll be able to fly through 3D landscapes made by electron microscopes, like these? (Via MyMarkup.se)
I-Ball: IT Pro writes: “The I-Ball is a portable, wireless, projectile camera that allows soldiers to view an area before they move in using real-time video with 360-degree view. It can be thrown into a room, or sent flying using a grenade launcher – offering images during flight and after it lands.”
Just released, Google SketchUp 7 (for PC and Mac) is free and features some impressive-looking new features. Here’s the obligatory Google YouTube announcement for us the ADDled generation:
Most relevant for Google Earth users is the much tighter integration with the Google 3D Warehouse: You can search the warehouse from within SketchUp and import models directly. Sharing and and giving credit for your work is now also much more granular.
SketchUp 7 also introduces Dynamic Components, objects which can be given dynamic attributes and simple physics. For example, you can stretch a table and its legs won’t deform but instead will become a longer table. Doors can be made to open and close in a model. And if your objects have metadata, like part numbers or color options, you can track these as well in an associated spreadsheet.
The free version of SketchUp 7 can use premade Dynamic Components (Google has some ready in its 3D Warehouse), but to make them yourself you’ll need SketchUp Pro 7, which costs $495.
It’s not clear at this time whether the dynamic aspects of a model can be exported to Google Earth — there’d certainly be some interesting uses for it there, such as 3D models that can be made to reveal their interiors with a click. But others will have to experiment… (ADD, remember?:-) [Update 10:43 UTC: I did try after all, and the answer seems to be No, dynamic properties are not exported to Google Earth.]
Rome Reborn 2.0 website launched: The most recent iteration of the Ancient Rome dataset, Rome Reborn 2.0, gets its own website with photo galleries, project news and associated scholarly papers. How do I know? Because the project’s director of 3D modelling, Kim Dylla, told us so on her own LiveJournal page.
Virtual Byzantium: Google talks about Rome circia 320 AD in Google Earth as the “first” such project. What other cities might follow? One obvious candidate: Byzantium circa 1200 AD.
Classics don’s mixed review: Cambridge professor of classics and Times of London blogger Mary Beard gives Ancient Rome for Google Earth a mixed review. For one, she found it impossible to load on her new Mac laptop (and so have I. Is this a problem with Google Earth for Mac for others too? The KML files start loading but then crawl to a halt.) She’s also got a question about how authoritative the layer is. Perhaps someone can answer her?
The rest:
Xenia: Marine sensor web specialist and ObsKML creator Jeremy Cothran is now developing the open-source Xenia, “a relational database schema which can be used for various geospatial observation oriented efforts.” The idea is to start putting sensor data into a schema as early as possible, to avoid the manual labor involved in standardizing gathered info. Jeremy writes:
What I am trying to share and develop interest in are very lightweight development approaches to do some interesting things regarding observations data collection and sharing. The code shared at the project site is perl and the relational database (if implemented for longer term storage of datasets) is sqlite using the same schema across multiple sqlite db files which are time separated by julian week. I have no problem if other developers wish to re-develop or develop new functionality with the language or database of their choice – the goal of what I’m going for is more to support some basic/default level of functionality or package that folks collecting data can adopt/plug into using SQL, XML and their programming language of choice without having to be a file format, database or web services expert on the available output products end.
Where 2.0 2009 Call for Participation:The call is now open. Submit by December 2 for the May 19-21 event.
Where’s metered mapping?James Fee starts an interesting discussion on the internal mapping needs of small businesses — their needs appear to fall between to chairs, with “illegal” free maps on the one hand and $10,000+ licenses on the other.
UK OS licensing & Google Maps API: Meanwhile, UK’s Ordnance Survey tells local government agencies that OS data licensing terms do no allow them to post OS-derived data on top of Google Maps via the Google Maps API because the API licensing terms grant Google broad usage rights to the data. This prompts Google to rewrite and clarify its terms, as mentioned by Google’s Ed Parsons.
New $3500 graphics card: Can’t wait for the future, when the power of the new NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 graphics card fits into my laptop and costs $200. Imagine what virtual globes and worlds will look like then. How many years will the wait be, do you think?
Update: Oops, almost forgot: Pictures from my trip to Alexandria this past weekend:
– Any iPhone used while roaming in Egypt does not have GPS enabled
– An unlocked iPhone used with an Egyptian carrier’s SIM does not have GPS enabled
I haven’t been using my iPhone’s GPS here in Egypt as my Swedish roaming dataplan is prohibitively expensive. But my Nokia N95 with a local sim card has not had any such Egyptian carrier-induced constraints on its A-GPS, as you can see from my updated location on the map in the top-right corner of this web page.
At a press conference in Rome at noon today, Google’s Michael Jones and Rome’s mayor Gianni Alemanno (cough) are announcing “Ancient Rome 3D” — The city of Rome as it was in 320 AD, brought to life via 6,700 buildings and monuments, 716 separate textures and 250 informational placemarks on historically accurate terrain. It’s an entirely new kind of default layer for Google Earth — one that mirrors history as well as geography.
This layer wasn’t built from scratch just now, however. Its development is the culmination of decades of work spanning some very different technologies. Between 1935 to 1971, the Italian archaeologist Italo Gismondi directed the rebuilding the Rome of Emperor Constantine as a real physical plaster-of-paris 1:250 scale model. You can visit the Plastico di Roma imperiale today at the Museo della Civiltà Romana:
In 1997, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia began a collaboration with UCLA and Politecnico di Milano to build a digital model of Ancient Rome that would become Rome Reborn 1.0. The starting point was Gismondi’s physical model, which they proceeded to digitize.
That process proved to be fascinating, as IATH director Bernhard Frischer described in a talk in 2007 at the US National Endowment for the Humanities. It’s worth excerpting a longish passage of his speech, available as a PDF.
We scanned the Plastico di Roma Antica with a Metric Vision LR200 laser scanner. […] From our scan results, you could reverse-engineer the model, but the results were not at a level of quality that was adequate for virtual reality applications. There were distortions all over the results that we got. [… W]e were able to find some very smart students […] and put them to work on our idea of deriving algorithms to go through all the scanned data and infer the underlying geometric forms. It turned out there were thirty-eight simple geometric forms for the buildings and about another twenty for the roofs.
It is the interaction, the permutations and combinations of these thirty-eight building forms and roof forms that give the impression of great variety to the overall model. We then could make those roof and building types by hand, and with the help of six students from the Politecnico di Milano we were able to repopulate all the scan data with the simple clean and crisp geometric forms. […]
So to summarize, […w]e have the born-digital Class I hand-made models of 31 buildings in Rome. […] For the moment, the other (ca. 234) Class I buildings are included in Class II, the schematically represented buildings not known in any detail. These buildings were made first by scanning the “Plastico di Roma Antica,” then by reducing the scan data to a library of basic geometric types, and finally by hand modeling these types. Hence, we can classify our overall city model as a hybrid meta-model. It is hybrid insofar as it was made by a combination of hand and scan modeling. It is a “meta-model” insofar as it was inspired by the physical model of Gismondi, making it (in part, at least) the model of a model.
Metamodels!
Rome Reborn’s digital model is seeing some interesting uses. One recent commercial application is TimeMachine, a handheld gadget that you can roam around modern-day Rome with, point at ancient monuments and get a 3D reconstruction of what they looked like in 320 AD. The dataset was also used to create the edutainment orientation film Rewind Rome, shown to visitors at the Coliseum:
Rome Reborn 2.0 was launched at SIGGRAPH2008 in August this year. For this latest version, the models from Rome Reborn 1.0 were imported into Procedural’s CityEngine:
In the CityEngine, grammar rules have been designed under the guidance of archaeological consulting. These rules have then be applied to refine the mass models, resulting in detailed 3D building models, which then can be exported into any 3d package or visualisation software.
And boy does the end result look good:
The Rome Reborn dataset has now also been exported as a collection of KML Collada models with the help of Past Perfect Productions (beware Flash site) — and that’s what you get in Google Earth’s Ancient Rome 3D layer. The buildings aren’t quite as gorgeous in Google Earth as in a professional 3D authoring and visualizing tool (duh), but they are now available to anyone in the world with a broadband internet connection, and that leads to some intriguing opportunities. Google knows this too, of course, which is why they are sponsoring a Ancient Rome Curriculum Contest for K-12 school teachers in the US.
There are many great historical novels set in ancient Rome, from Robert Graves’s I Claudius to Robert Harris’s Imperium to Gore Vidal’s Julian. The latter is set in Rome of the 350’s and 60’s AD, within a generation of the model now visible in Google Earth. I can’t wait for the literary placemark tour.
Another possible use for the new Google Earth layer: placing your own modern photos of Roman monuments in such a way that they mimic the view you’d have had, had you been there in 320 AD. I’ll try to make one once the layer is live.
One more detail: I talked to Google Geoteam product manager Bruce Polderman briefly for this embargoed piece, and he cautioned that while all the class 1 buildings are in accurate placed and ready, the class 2 buildings might still see some “floaters”, but that they’ve been focussing on getting the class 1 buildings right and will be updating the class 2 buildings in the coming weeks.
Nokia sells GPS-disabled phone in Egypt: Nokia has reversed its earlier decision not to sell GPS-disabled versions of its phones with the introduction of the N96 in Egypt this week, minus GPS. Egyptians, enterprising as they are in circumventing silly bureaucratic regulations, have already figured out that the on-chip GPS functionality can be restored with a firmware upgrade, according to this comment. Meanwhile, banners are announcing the imminent arrival of the iPhone later this month. Even the street urchins are transfixed (taken with my iPhone from inside the store):
Geobrowser unplugged: An art installation at the Singapore Biennale by Thai artist Wit Pimkanchanapong consists of a huge walkable satellite map of the country, onto which visitors can physically attach stickies with notes. Looks like fun.
iPhone geoapp review: iPhone apps using the built-in GPS functionality are a dime a dozen these days. Mashable looks at 15 free ones.
OSM for iPhone: OpenStreetMap’s open-source mapping project now has an easy way for you to contribute if you have an iPhone. Just buy ($1) OSMTrack by Dmitri Toropov, let it run, and then upload your track directly to the servers. One drawback to using the iPhone presents itself, though: Running the app non-stop results in a battery lifespan of just 3 hours. There are reasons to own a dedicated GPS device yet. (Via Very Spatial)
Future UI:Make brings us news of yet another Minority Report-esque user interface. Microsoft Research’s Andy Wilson has created a really clever system where you point a webcam at your keyboard and then make shapes with your hands over it; you can do some very nifty navigating on a virtual globe:
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
