Seero, the service that lets you stream your own live georeferenced video to the web, has just made itself embeddable. To illustrate how this works, Seero is attending Where 2.0 this week as a member of the press, where it will be reporting live on the proceedings. You can watch Where 2.0 live, embedded, right here on Ogle Earth:
Until the live broadcasts start at Where 2.0, you’ll be watching a pre-recorded on-demand playlist. Even if it turns out that GPS tracking doesn’t work so well indoors, it is wonderful to be able to stream Where 2.0 live to the web. (You can make your own embedded stream like the one above here.)
Well, the “throat infection” was actually a misdiagnosed pneumonia, and it ended up taking a wee stay in the hospital to beat that into submission. (I found myself mouthing the lyrics to Lloyd Cole & the Commotions’ Lost Weekend — though to be fair, the price of the medicine is quite reasonable here in Cairo.) I’m recovering well, so it’s time to dive back into the blogging…
KML syncing: One challenge facing relief workers: Updating local data and then sharing it. InSTEDD’s Eduardo Jezierski’s built Mesh4x KML Adapter, a syncing tool for KML files that should solve precisely this problem. Comes with a bonus monster KML file containing everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the Central African Republic, and then some.
According to Min Yiren, vice head of [China’s] State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, authorities hope to get rid of online maps that wrongly depict China’s borders or that reveal military secrets, the People’s Daily said Monday.
Too bad that that horse bolted from the barn back in 2005. Chinese military secrets have been a free-for all on Google Earth Community (GEC) since day one of the launch of Google Earth. It would be a pity if Chinese surfers were to be cut off from Google’s mapping resources. But I very much doubt that Google will ever remove three years of collective intelligence gleaned from Digital Globe’s high resolution imagery on GEC or begin restricting new such info for the rest of us. Still, a battle between Google and China’s government over this could be quite bloody.
Find a missing Mars lander: The Mars Polar Lander was lost just as it was about to land near Mars’s South Pole in 1999. There are now some excellent sub-meter resolution images of the region taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and you’re being asked to help comb those images to find the Mars Polar Lander. The setup is not as sophisticated as Amazon’s mechanical turk, used in the search for Steve Fossett and Jim Gray, but then again the task is not as urgent. (Via Bad Astronomy)
Berlin Wall Guide: Berlin has introduced the Mauer Guide, a handheld GPS-enabled device that help you trace the course of the Berlin Wall, much of it now demolished. Just like in a museum, it tells you about what you see around you, except that it knows where you are via GPS. Very cool. (Via Spiegel Online)
Géoportail launches API: France’s National Geographic Agency’s Géoportail gets the promised API (beta). It’s built on open source OpenLayers tech (wow) and lets web developers incorporate French cartographic data into their web apps. Only 2D at the moment, and only 100 page views per day are allowed, among other restrictions. In other words, for beta testing purposes only.
Google Ocean:CNet reports that Google is planning to come out with a 3D bathymetry tool called Google Ocean. The Earth is Squarecan’t help but point out that Google is playing catchup to NASA World Wind, which has had 3D bathymetry since 2004.
World Wide Telescope gets a launch date:Bill Gates says Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope will be launched by the end of May.
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 1:A Windows application that lets you edit the EXIF metadata of your photos, including RAW photos, with a special focus on georeferencing. You can marry your photos to a GPS tracklog, or place photos on Virtual Earth, and then get the name of the place via reverse geocoding. There are other georeferencing tools out there for Windows, but none that do so much for free. (Via Ars Technica)
LoadMyTracks 1.3: Mac GPS utility of choice LoadMyTracks gets a pretty solid update. Free.
JetPhoto Studio 3.0.1:This update to the Mac photo georeferencing/CMS tool adds searching for photos by location.
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
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:
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.
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…
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 (‚Ǩ25) 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.
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.
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.
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…
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:
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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:
