Wednesday, November 4. 2009

More on How Google Does 3D

Martin Daly (Lost in Spatial blog) summarizes Ed Parsons latest talk (at BCS) and I grabbed these tidbits about how the 3D building data is captured.

- Street View uses LIDAR to get the building shapes, for the fancy navigation, and bespoke cameras because the high number of images captured broke the shutters in consumer digital cameras. [I'm almost tempted to make an analogy with consumer slippy maps and bespoke GIS there, but I'll refrain.]
-Google use their own plane to capture the oblique images for Building Maker.

Monday, October 19. 2009

Podcast: A Hallway Conversation with Carl Reed

Adena Schutzberg interviewed the Open Geospatial Consortium's Carl Reed about the status of KML, OGC's new role in enabling discipline focussed efforts, why GeoRSS seems so hidden, INTERGEO and why the US is behind in using standards. This is the first in a series of interviews with geospatial insiders and outsiders.

Tuesday, July 7. 2009

Local GIS Tidbits

The British Columbia city of Nanaimo has built nearly 20 SketchUp models of buildings in its downtown to send to Google for approval and integration into Google Earth. City employees and members of the community are doing the modeling using "Sketchup Pro and Google Pro, along with a photo of a particular building’s facade."

- Nanaimo Bulletin

Washington DC has updated its sex offender registry and mapping app to include the ability for residents to search the database based on addresses. Until now, that is, since 2001, users could only search by the cryptic Police Service Area (PSA). There are 45 of those in the district and citizens don't generally know in which one they live. Now visitors can find offenders who live or work within a 1/4 or 1/2 mile radius of an address. Many comments on the site on the matter pushed the Police Dept to update the app (built on Google Maps) with the new functionality.

- Washington Post

The Alcohol and Substance Abuse Council of Jefferson County Inc. (New York) aims "to gather community agencies and organizations to get them on board with using geographic information system mapping to examine the density of alcohol outlets in the north country and compare that data with various social, criminal and health-related trends." I guess there's no licensing of these outlets or perhaps they are looking for illegal ones. For now there's no GIS and the group is just looking for local support to follow the lead of a graduate project of Robert S. Pezzolesi which shows that focused interventions on the alcohol environment can help other social ills.

- Watertown Daily Times

Wednesday, April 15. 2009

Barron's on ADSK, SGI

I was catching up on my reading of Barron's and came across some interesting financial news pertinent to the geospatial sector. First, I came across the April 13^th editorial by Alan Abelson. If you are not familiar with Abelson, he is, IMHO, the best financial news editor/writer in the business, bar none, because his whit and prose are simply unmatched. Abelson chronicles the whimsical comments by Autodesk (ADSK)CEO Carl Bass where he jokingly referred to Antarctica and Greenland as the only geographies possibly unaffected by the economic downturn. (You can find the exact quotes in my review of that analyst call.)

Abelson goes on to say that, "Besides the pleasure of finding a CEO with a sense of humor and, equally important, one who doesn't suffer foolish questions gladly, the exchange struck us as symptomatic of the insatiable yearning of Wall Street, in general, and sell-side analysts, in particular, to uncover some sliver of bullishness beneath the dismal surface of the unvarnished truth."

If there is an upside to this story, it's that ADSK has recovered to around $18.39 per share up from just under $12 per share during the deepest, darkest downturn last month. In an earlier Barron's there was mention of a recommendation to buy the stock at that low level. Looks like more than a few took their advice (full disclosure, I am a stock holder).

Also in the April 13^th Barron's issue was a small note about the bankruptcy filing of Silicon Graphics. Once the high flyer of high powered workstations for GIS, SGI filed for Chapter 11 on April ^1st. It sold its assets to Rackable Systems (RACK) for $25 million.

Tuesday, January 20. 2009

DigitalGlobe, AEgis Release Images Prepared for Inauguration

DigitalGlobe and AEgis Technologies recently issued a press release regarding their partnership to develop ImageScape, a 3D imagery solution that generates virtual models of any location in the world. I covered this relationship in an article written on how these companies were creating images for NBC during the Olympics. For the inauguration, the two companies released sample ImageScape images available of the D.C. area, including the White House, and the Washington Monument. Images courtesy of DigitalGlobe and AEgis Technologies. See below (click each below for a larger image:

Sunday, January 18. 2009

CNN, GeoEye, Microsoft Photosynth to Capture Inauguration

CNN, Microsoft and GeoEye are collaborating in various ways to capture the inauguration of Barack Obama in imagery. CNN is asking anyone attending the inauguration to send digital photographs to contribute to a project called "The Moment" that will feature a 3D montage using Microsoft's Photosynth. Microsoft is asking those using a camera phone or digital camera to take photos and mail them to cnnmoment@live.com but to make sure that the Capitol building is in the image as the technology uses common reference points to create the 3D image. 

GeoEye will have GeoEye-1 passing over the Mall at 11:19 a.m. on Tuesday according to Beet.tv. Weather permitting, high resolution imagery will be provided to the media. The image will also be used as part of the Photosynth project.