Zebra Imaging Challenge and other GIS Contests

Zebra Imaging is launching the 3D Geospatial Challenge "to encourage participants from the GIS community to use Zebra Imaging's software tools and print services to portray their GIS data using holographic technology."

Participants in the Zebra Imaging 3D Geospatial Challenge will compete by framing their 3D data set using Zebra Imaging's ZScape(TM) Preview or ZScape(TM) Exporter software.

http://store.zebraimaging.com/download.aspx

Each entry will be reviewed by a panel of Zebra Imaging judges for the following:

Creativity

Design efficiency

Technical complexity

Usefulness of application

Zebra Imaging will select three winners from the following industries: Public Safety, Planning, and Defense.

Winners of the challenge will receive a 24" x 24" 3D holographic print of their data and an illumination stand. The winning concepts will be displayed at the Zebra Imaging Booth at the Esri International User Conference the week of July 23, 2012 in San Diego, CA.

For more information regarding the challenge:

http://www.zebraimaging.com/challenge

- press release

MIT Researchers Working on 3D Data Capture/Gesture Interface for Cell Phones

3D data capture and gesture recognition are hot and that' what Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and his group at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics are working on. Two of his colleagues Kirmani and Colaco were selected as one of eight winners (out of 146 university applicants) of a $100,000 grant through its 2011 Innovation Fellowship program. The detail of how the sensors can be made small enough and cheap enough are worth reviewing if you want the gory details.

- MIT

Convergence: Augmented Reality & BIM & 3D - Who Will Be the Users?

If you are feeling bombarded by the latest and greatest for 3D visualization you are not alone. This week I was struck that news about augmented reality seems to be percolating again. I sensed a lull in the action in AR over the last few months but now both Layar and metaio reloaded with recent announcements. Layar announced their Layar Vision (watch the video below), an enhancement to their platform with more realism and metaio announced a conference on AR plus something called The Augmented City (watch the video below). (See the news on all recent AR announcements.)

In particular, watching the Augmented City demo by metaio I was trying to determine who their audience would be. The demo shows a more dynamic view of a modeled city with location-based advertising placement and other external stylizing of building facades. But I had to question if the technology was more for city managers or was it truly more consumer oriented.

In general, the buzz around building information models, that learns toward the integration of more internal building information, and LiDAR point clouds that render external building and road features with true location accuracy got me thinking about a convergence with AR and the intended audience.

The camps of architects and engineers, remote sensing geospatialists, and the augmented reality folks have pieces of the visualization puzzle that provide aspects of 3D that could, but don't have to, come together. But you should rightfully ask who the audience is for all of these visualization model types and are the products they produce useful to each. You see, we love our techno toys without realizing whether they are useful ... technology in search of a market, if you will. But these visualization tools are begging for convergence or integration. Whether they should or not is the question.

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