Four short links: 13 November 2009

Open Source Design, Interesting NoSQL Use, Copyright Documentary, Location Intelligence

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Open Source Enters The World of Atoms -- an academic statistical analysis of open design. We indicated that, in open design communities, tangible objects can be developed in very similar fashion to software; one could even say that people treat a design as source code to a physical object and change the object via changing the source.
2. Why I Like Redis (Simon Willison) -- coherent explanation of why Simon likes and uses a particular nosql system. I can run a long running batch job in one Python interpreter (say loading a few million lines of CSV in to a Redis key/value lookup table) and run another interpreter to play with the data that’s already been collected, even as the first process is streaming data in. I can quit and restart my interpreters without losing any data. And because Redis semantics map closely to Python native data types, I don’t have to think for more than a few seconds about how I’m going to represent my data.
3. © kiwiright (Vimeo) -- short documentary about copyright, made to raise awareness of the issues in New Zealand. (just as applicable to the rest of the world)
4. Your Movements Speak For Themselves (Jeff Jonas) -- Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below10 meters. A thought-provoking roundup of the information leakage with modern locative systems. (via TomC on Twitter)

Resetting Expectations: Some Augmented Reality Links

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 9

1. Mobile Devices and AR: Besides employing the location of users (Wikitude), there are generally two ways to overlay data onto the real world: through markers ( (2D) bar codes) or through automatic object/image recognition algorithms ("markerless"). The Economist gives a good overview of the different mobile applications that are starting to emerge and lists a few areas where AR makes sense such as shopping (letting house-hunters which properties are for sale) and events (giving sports fans access to stats and player bios).

2. 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere: @gnat linked to a recent RWW post, that lists high-level challenges the AR industry needs to address, including spam and security, interoperability, user experience, and openess.

3. For technical challenges facing AR developers, I recently had a chance to visit with computer scientist and Everyscape CTO/founder, @mok_oh, who's also been blogging about AR. In the first of two posts, he points out that accurate object and image recognition remain formidable^† technical hurdles ("accurate registration of the virtual objects with the real-world image"). Without object and image recognition, Mok points out that some of the more well-known AR apps may not actually be augmented reality apps in the classic sense (" ... there’s not much difference between this and Google Maps on your mobile phone").

In a follow-up post, Mok warns that too much hype may be worst thing that can happen to AR. Serious technical problems need to be resolved:

I still think we need to continue to expand/expound on vision algorithms (e.g. image tracking, image detection/recognition, etc.) and couple that with other sensors (e.g. Wifi, RFID, Bluetooth, accelerators, gyros, GPS, compasses, etc.) to more precisely tell people what they’re seeing in an interactive and augmented sense. The level of precision provided by current apps are good from a mapping perspective (i.e. the 2D “aerial” view), but not good enough from a first-person’s ground perspective. ... Perhaps, we need to reset people’s expectations somehow, or rebrand the words to something else. Because I really do think that there’s plenty of use for AR-inspired technologies as being defined by Layars and Wikitudes of the world.

Everything I read indicates that the more likely scenario in the near future is that AR applications will use a combination of sensors (like a GPS) and markers. In contrast, accurate markerless AR is a distant dream, that will remain locked away in the world of science fiction for years to come.

(†) Mok was at Foo camp last month and I had a chance to talk to him about AR and related topics. Given that he has long worked in the relevant fields within computer science, I take his word on the state-of-the-art in computer vision.

Four short links: 18 June 2009

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

1. Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." (read the original paper)
2. Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL -- The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?
3. GeoSPARQL -- RDF meets geo goodness. SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE { ?s gn:name "Dallas" . ?s ?p ?o } (via the geowanking mailing list)
4. How To Be Happy in Business -- this Venn diagram makes me happy. (via Ned Batchedler)

Clarke and the Continuous Location Update

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 7

I love the idea of Fire Eagle, Yahoo's under-supported location-brokering service. However until recently I found myself unable to use it. I had no mobile service that I could consistently rely on to update Fire Eagle.

Enter Clarke. Clarke (named after Arthur C. Clarke) is a small tool that runs in the background on my Mac. It updates my location on FireEagle every 5 minutes. It triangulates me via Skyhook (the same location-service that is used on the iPhone). Like all FireEagle apps Clarke used OAuth to gain access to my account (developer Tom Taylor used oauthconsumer). Tom has released the Clarke code on Github.

If you don't have a Mac or don't wish to run Clarke for some other reason these Fire Eagle updater might do the trick for you. Fire Eagle Updater Add-on for Firefox has a very descriptive name. This Firefox extension was developed by Yahoo! and requires the Geode extension. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a similar updater for Windows.

The reason I bring up Clarke is not that you can update FireEagle; there are plenty of apps (79 in the gallery) that work with the service. Instead, it's interesting because of its continuous background updates. I don't have to think about it and can leave it running all the time, which means it gets forgotten.

When I setup a continuous location-updater I have to think about the actions of my future self. How can I guard against him? What if there are places or times that I do not want revealed (shopping for a birthday present, my home, etc.)? I take care of this by usually only sharing my neighborhood (it's useful for both locals and non-locals without getting too specific). However, in the future I'd like time-based rules (share specific places after 5PM), white lists (always share bars or when I am in San Francisco) and black-lists (never share my home). Services like Clarke and Fire Eagle and Latitude will need to add these safeguards before they get wide spread adoption.

Four short links: 27 May 2009

Hacker Browser, Design and Engineering, Twitter Data, Fire Eagle Updater for OS X

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious)
2. A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest essence, we could make a fortune selling it on the black market ...
3. Twitter Data -- using Twitter as a conduit for messages that have semantic markup. My gut reaction is that I'd prefer pure JSON in the data tweets, because a hybrid gives you poor use of the limited bandwidth and there seems no strong reason to care about human readability. (via Ted Leung)
4. Clarke -- elegant OS X updater for Fire Eagle that uses Skyhook to determine your location.

Four short links: 4 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Data, climate change, and location:

1. Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!'s web applications." Greg keeps up with the papers from the search engine companies, and the insights he offers are great. For example, "Second, as figures 3 and 4 show, the average latency of requests to their database seems quite high, roughly 100 ms. This is high enough that web applications probably would incur too much total latency if they made a few requests serially (e.g. ask for some data, then, depending on what the data looks like, ask for some other data). That seems like a problem.".
2. Google Latitude -- app and service for mobile phones (G1, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian) and desktops, where your location is tracked and displayed on a map which you can share with your friends. Interesting use of the map to get some Dodgeball-like functionality, but without programmatic access it's less functional than FireEagle. I'm still not sure I really understand the use cases for this, and assume that over time it will evolve into something more practical.
3. Without Hot Air -- the full text of an excellent book on global warming is available. Well written and well thought. I look forward to the inevitable flood of foot-stamping carbon polluters harrumphing about flawed science and the inevitable final triumph of the flat earth geocentric cosmology.
4. Is Big Data at a Tipping Point? -- Tim pointed me to this a while ago, but I don't think he's blogged about it. Thesis is that as more and more open data gets out there, it'll eventually be cross-related into something big and useful. The author asks how close we are to that. If the premise is true (and I'm not sure I buy the phase change metaphor), I think we're definitely not going to be saying within 12 months "remember when we didn't have enough useful plentiful accurate mashable data? thank goodness those days are past!".

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

In today's edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

1. Echo Chamber - the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story's spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting - build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
3. ActiveRecordJS - just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it's interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
4. I Am Here: One Man's Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle - a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn't all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.

Four short links: 13 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Apologies for the delay. Just remember Douglas Adams's great line: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

1. Misconceptions and Objections to Gaza Mapping - Mikel Maron deals to objections about the OpenStreetMap call for help to build an accurate free streetmap of Gaza. This is fantastic work from OSM.
2. Twenty Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery - I am generally loathe to link to linkbait ("X most Y Zs!") even though I'm guilty of it myself. This just pushes my jQuery love button, and the jQuery love button loves to be pushed.
3. http://rocketstrikes.iamnear.net - as you cruise around London, find out where the bombs struck in WW II. There are huge opportunities for locative services to open up historical geodata like this, in the same way that Pepys Diary Blog and Dear Miss Griffis have brought old diaries to life.
4. Differential Synchronization - the solution to the problem of "two people are editing the same document at the same time, and you need to make sure they're each seeing the same thing".

Donkeypedia.nl: Get a Donkey's Eye-View of Amsterdam & PICNIC

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

Here at PICNIC there is a donkey named Asino being led around by a fellow named Christian. The pair have a GPS, solar-panels and a video camera. As they roam around Amsterdam they geotag videos and photos for uploading to Donkeypedia, a Dutch-language site. As far as I know it is the only Donkey-enabled mashup.

The site takes a unique approach to showing the content and breaks out of "red-dot fever". It takes advantage of the time-stamp (unlike so many sites and mashups) and lets you move through content forwards and backwards. When the donkey moves to a point the associated images and videos appear for viewing.

I am sure that Christian and Asino's PICNIC imagery will be up soon.

ETech CFP Ends Friday (9/19)

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

Hurry! The Call For Participation for ETech 2009 closes this Friday (9/19). We've got a lot of great submissions so far, but we'd like to see more. The submissions will all be reviewed by mid-October. Below are the major themes of the conference. If you've worked on technology in any of these areas submit a talk.

• City Tech: Our cities are growing, getting bigger faster than ever before. People are rushing to them in search of economic and social opportunity -- jobs, urban living, and access to culture. How can technology help us create livable, prosperous, sustainable cities? What should mass transit look like? How can we infuse urban infrastructure with sustainability? How are cities using citizens data to become smarter? What can economics tell us about the way urban populations will change and behave?
• Materials & Mechanics: Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We'll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?
• Personalized Healthcare: Medical technology is something that almost everyone comes to rely on, whether it's hopeful, preventive care in the form of Reseveratol, or a new limb. In no other area does the industrialized world have more of an advantage. What legal framework for personal genomics balances innovation and appropriate medical caution? How is medicine changing? How is healthcare changing across the world? Many resources are focused on anti-aging technology and drugs -- is this the right direction?
• Mobile & The Web: The next billion people will come to the Web via connected mobile devices. Currently, many of these devices are humble dumb clients, but the iPhone, Google, and Nokia are bringing smarter clients to the masses with open platforms. How will these mini-computers change our lives? How will these jumbo-sized sensors benefit us? Will we be able to use the third screen to view an augmented world? What data will be collected and who will have access to it? Is the Web ready for the Next Billion? What will their web apps look like?
• Geek Family: Digital native mothers and fathers are starting their own families. How is that changing home technology? Education technology? What does the future geek home look like and how does it function?
• Synthetic Biology: We can't cover the reinvention of living without looking at the new definition of life. Synthetic biology, first pioneered in the 1970s, is becoming a factor in the development of new materials, medicines, environmental cleansing, and energy. How will this technology impact our lives? How can we be a part of it? What will bring it into the hands of the wider public?

But ETech isn't just about "haves" and "have-nots". Some people choose to live with constraints within the abundant world. What trends and innovations are emerging?

• Nomadism & Shedworking: As cities and their suburbs rapidly increase their footprint, there are some who reject the crowded living conditions, but take advantage of the connectedness. They adopt a high-tech lifestyle within the constraints of a smaller space or take their posessions and their bits with them on the road, to the farthest reaches of the globe. How do they do this and what can we learn from them?
• Sustainable Life: The American lifestyle is unsustainable. How do we move to one-Earth economy? What are Europeans doing? Will Dubai be the trendsetter with its newest sustainable city? How will a renewed interest in environmental design affect us? Last year's keynoter Alex Steffen posited that it would be technology driving the change, not a restriction of habits or an energy diet. Right now the abundant world is being changed by rising oil and medical costs, forcing change. What technology will break through?
• Life Hacking & Information Overload: We are bombarded with too much information, but at least some of it is relevant. What are the tools that we can use to process it? How can we identify the subset we actually care about? How do we identify the necessary bits of information that makes us more productive? Can we use cognitive science to help us deal with modern day living? What does neuroscience tell us about our brains and how we should handle learning and processing? Will ubicomp be able to help us stave off the overload or will it hasten our doom?

Apple's Big Location Chance, Or When Is The iPhone Going To Use That GPS?

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 17

Apple's iPhone is being heralded for all of its location-aware apps like Whrrl and Loopt. Unfortunately location-aware apps are currently crippled. I want a setting to record my location throughout the day. I want third-party apps that I trust to be able to access it. Until then Apple is crippling these apps' potential and not letting the iPhone live up to this Wired cover.

Right now the iPhone updates my location only when I go to an app that requests it. On my iPhone these include Google Maps, Loopt, Whrrl. WikiMe, and Earthscape (to name a few). For many of these apps this setup works fine; they are geobrowsers. Once the app has my location it lets me know what relevant information they can provide or how to get somewhere. Loopt and Whrrl, though they are part geobrowser, have a very different set of functionality. They want to let me know where my friends are. Right now they can't. They can only tell me where my friends were the last time they logged in and location is information that degrades quickly.

Apple does not allow third-party apps to run background processes. If they did an app could have a "LocationGrabber" running in the background and it would update that app's (and probably only that app's) servers every 15 minutes (or so). The app would also be able to alert me when I wandered near a friend or if there was a Wikipedia article about a nearby statue. This would, of course, kill my battery and slow the system down (especially if I had multiple apps that wanted my location).

Instead of allowing third-party apps to run background processes Apple has promised to provide them the ability to push messages to the client. This is perfect for apps like instant messaging; it can alert me when a friend has pinged me. Or a calendar that can remind me when I have an appointment. However this system will not work for location-dependant apps. How can Loopt or Whrrl accurately let me know that a friend is nearby when it doesn't know where I am? It only knows where I was. Apple has to check my location periodically and make that information available to trusted apps.

Why do I want this functionality? I'd like to get metrics on my daily path (How long do I spend grocery shopping vs. the gym vs. home?). I'd like to let friends know when I am near (and vice-versa). I'd like to be alerted when I am near a virtual note. In theory I'd like to at least have the option of being alerted with a location-based coupon. I want to learn about what I do, not what I think I do.

Aren't I afraid that I'll be tracked? Not really. By using a cellphone my location can already be determined by the government or the carriers or possibly Apple. I have decided that I am OK with sacrificing this privacy for the ability to make a call on the go. Having made this big leap already I am not concerned about the incremental step of sharing my location more broadly. I would expect that my phone and the associated apps would give me full control over my data: what hours I want to be tracked, how I want that shared, the ability to delete my data (basically I expect them to be as respectful as Fire Eagle).

The iPhone has huge mind-share with location-aware apps. I hope Apple uncripples them. Nokia isn't going to pass up this advantage and Android certainly isn't going to come out of the gates making the same mistake.

Image courtesy: jurvetson

Where Camp PDX 2008

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

For the past two years the geo community has hosted WhereCamp right after Where 2.0 to discuss the events of the conference. Now it looks like WhereCamp is going regional! Portland will be hosting their own geo-oriented unconference called WhereCamp PDX from 10/18-19. As they describe it:

An unconference is a conference planned by the participants, we all convene together, plan sessions, and have break-outs into sessions. This gives everybody an opportunity to bring to the table the things that interest them the most and lets us talk about new topics that are still new and exploratory. Part of what is important to hearing new voices and getting new ideas is lowering barriers to participation - this event is free and it is driven by the participants.

What kinds of people and topics will be discussed?

This event is community driven and is what you make it. It provide cross pollination between many different kinds of folks from all walks of life. Topics may include remote sensing, geoinformatics, forestry and agriculture, food chain transparency, civil engineering, emergency disaster relief, urban planning, local search, context awareness, place hacking, social cartography, citizen journalism, locative gaming, psychogeography, locative art, and beyond. Expect to participate in conversations on the nature of place as described in pixels, with rays, on paper, and by social practice!

RSVP if you can make it. I'll be on a plane to Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe and will not be able to attend.

Watch GeoEye-1 Launch Tomorrow; Thoughts on the Imagery War

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

GeoEye, an imagery provider, is launching their latest satellite, GeoEye-1, tomorrow. This satellite will offer half-meter resolution imagery to commercial companies and even greater resolution to government agencies (as high .41 meters). As was widely reported last week, the new imagery has been licensed exclusively to Google for online purposes (CNET has more on the deal's terms).

The satellite will launch tomorrow (September 6th) "Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. The planned launch time is 11:50:57 a.m. PDT." You can watch the take-off live on Boeing's site.

If you're uncertain what this means take a look at the two images below. The one on the left is "1-meter simulated resolution from aerial imagery of Colorado Capitol and Downtown Denver” the on the right is .5-meter simulated resolution. It's an amazing increase. I hope that GeoEye-1 is used to catalog the world in this detail. You can see more comparison images on the GeoEye site.

This is the latest foray in what has become a battle for the best imagery with the between Google and Microsoft (where best means highest-resolution of the most places).

Long after the release of the late Jim Gray's TerraServer, Google started it with the release of satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005. Microsoft released 3D-enabled Virtual Earth in the browser later that year along with Birds Eye imagery. Google returned the volley in 2007 with Streetside view. Just last month Photosynth launched and was moved to the Virtual Earth team.

Of late both companies have been adding imagery of the sky and far away planets. Both companies have also released 3D modeling tools to allow users to supplement their virtual worlds. Google also recently released MapMaker to allow users to supplement Google's mapping data.

I've only listed the major product features each company has created; each month there is a release of imagery for a new country or city by each. In July Virtual Earth released imagery for cities in Finland, Belgium, and Japan. All total it was 14. TB; this is nothing compared to the 69TB that May's release included. Google's latest updates brought Streetview to Japan (the first international site), mapping data of Georgia, and fresh satellite imagery for the Olympics.

I expect this battle to continue and for we as consumers to benefit. I really love and appreciate the products these two companies make and subsidize. I am not sure when the one-upmanship will end, but personally I am not looking forward to it.

(Thanks to @boblozano for the GeoEye-1 back story and links)

First Burning Man Imagery Appears

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

The geo hackers were out at Burning Man in full force this year. Above is a screen capture from a GigaPan taken by Rich Gibson. The view I've chosen is centered on the Man's heart, but he captured the entire structure from a crane and you can zoom in much further than I've shown here (launch the full-screen viewer). Rich took 45 Gigapans while he was on the playa.

In case you are not familiar with them, GigaPan is a project sponsored by NASA/Ames, Google and Carnegie Mellon. It provides the ability for thousands of photos to be stitched together to provide an immersive view of an area. The project consists of a robotic camera mount, a photo uploader and a photo stitcher. The site has a lot of amazing imagery including Boston's Charles River and SF's Twin Peaks. If this is interesting to you they've opened the Beta.

The image to the right was taken by Mikel Maron (the champion of GeoRSS and a speaker at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC). Using a kite aerial photography kit he got a shot of the man from above.

There will be more imagery coming. There will be aerial imagery from the crew behind Pict'Earth. There will also be immersive Streetside View imagery taken via modified tricycles. In the meantime I suggest that you watch the geotagged photos trickle in on Flickr on their OSM Burning Man Map (Radar post).

Who Put the Google Earth in my Game?

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 9

I just saw the trailer for Sony's new game The Last Guy. In it you run around a city trying to lead people to safety with a top down view reminiscent of Google Earth or Yahoo! Maps or Live Maps. People follow you around the city creating an ever longer line, while you try to avoid monsters. As your line gets longer you get more points and can do more things like surround buildings to free all the trapped people.

I was struck by how ingrained in our society this (relatively) new way of looking at our world has become. Google Earth is the most useful virtual world that I interact with on a regular basis and I doubt that I am the only one who feels that way. It is on its way to becoming its own gaming platform (if its doesn't qualify already). Google added a flight simulator mode and GoogleEarthHacks hosts Gemmo, an MMO for the geobrowser. The still-in-Beta Google Earth browser API included a milk truck game at launch (Radar post). WIthin a week of that launch someone had created their own flight simulator for the plugin (as predicted by Google's Ed Parsons).

These are good experiments, but I think that Google Earth's real gaming future will come via a realtime location-tracking game. A game where people will both review their steps and plot their next move in the geobrowser. The geobrowsers are ready for this game, but unfortunately the realtime trackers are lagging. Hopefully our phones, which are the most likely device to keep the cloud updated with our locations, will soon be up for the task (it seems like Nokia will be soon with the LifeviNe app; the iPhone won't be until it adds location-tracking as a background process).

BTW, if you want to get a feel for The Last Guy game play check out their promotional site. It lets you run around any website as though it were the game.

(LifeviNe via PSFK via @sarawinge)
(The Last Guy trailer via @elanlee)

Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.

Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ. NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see what Yahoo's map currently looks like.

This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

In other geo-Flickr news they have added KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the tip on this Niall)

If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008 conference after the jump.

(continue reading)

Panamaps: A Multi-Layered Map

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 5

A map is valuable for its ability to convey information. Too much and its illeligible; too little and the map isn't very useful. Layers are used by cartographers to make maps more usable. Layers are easy to turn on and off on digital maps, but it's difficult to have multiple ones on a physical map. The recently-released Panamaps are able to have three layers on a single map. You can get Panamaps for Chicago and New York City. The layers include neighborhoods, transit and streets.

The maps are very cool and are very solid feeling. As you tilt the map you see a different layer. At certain angles you can see two layers at once. The technology behind the layers is fairly advanced as they explain:

1. Artwork for three views of Manhattan is created and optimized for visual performance. This requires a detailed understanding of typeface, line orientation, color contrast and a host of additional subtle but significant design concerns.

2. The three Images are interlaced by alternating horizontal strips from each. The resulting compound image is calibrated to a specially designed polymer lens substrate. Lenses contain between 60 to 200 micro-lenses per inch, depending on the desired outcome. This is mounted to a backing, die cut and packaged.

3. The underlying technology essentially fools the human eye. By rotating the map, the angle of viewing is changed and one of the resulting three layers can be viewed.

Panamaps are produced by Urban Mapping, a geo-data company known for its neighborhood and transit data (Radar post). The company sent me a map of each city. I will definitely be taking my Panamap with me around Manhattan when I am there for Web 2.0 Expo. Neighborhoods, streets, and transit are the most sensible layers for a city map, but what would really get me excited would be the ability to create Panamaps for any set of layers - perhaps your favorite Platial or Google MyMap of a city. Ian White, the CEO, didn't think the economics of this idea would work, but I think that there could be a real market for this.

Photosynth is Released and Moves to Virtual Earth

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 7

Live Labs has released Photosynth, the 3D-esque photo collection viewer that it first tech-previewed in 2006 (Radar post). With this release any Vista or XP user running FireFox or IE can create, view, and share Synths (Mac support is planned). I suggest exploring the Synths. There are some amazing ones available like Smith Tower in Seattle (home to the Photosynth team), Macchu Picchu and even scenes from World of Warcraft.

There are several controls and views associated with Synths. The 3D leaf brings you to a view where you zoom through the Synth either by clicking them or with arrows at the edges (shown above). In this view you will occasionally see a ring appear you can use that to rotate that view. From here you can also see the point cloud of images, which on quality Synths will reconstruct the original structure (to get this view use the Crtl button). The +/- controls will advance you though the pics. The play button will move through the photos in chronological order in a timed fashion (you can also use "." to advance one at a time, use ";" to go backwards). The dotted leaf takes you to the photview which let's you zoom in on any individual photo and really take advantage of the Seadragon image streaming technology (show above).

You'll have to download some code from Photosynth to view and create Synths. The install includes an ActiveX control for viewing in IE, a Firefox extension and the Synth creation software. After getting an account on their site you are ready to make a Synth! Making a Synth is fairly painless. Simply click "Make a New Synth" on the site and your new desktop software will open. Point it at your photos, name it and the software will do the rest. There are two things happening right now. One, all of your photos are being uploaded to their community site (all Synths are public). In parallel your Synth is being created on your machine. It generally takes longer to upload your photos than to make the Synth (this seemed to be true for me). Both of my Synths were done in under an hour (on an older laptop running XP); it used to take days on a cluster to get it done. Microsoft is using your machine to do the heavy lifting -- very smart!

There's an art to making a Synth, one that I apparently have no talent for as none of mine have turned out very well. You'll notice that all Synths have a "Synthy" percentage attached to them. The higher the number (up to 100%) the more pictures were used to create the core Synth. I tried making two (one of my house and one of an object) neither had a high Synthy value. Photosynth depends on the texture of the objects to construct a Synth. I do not know if the problem was the lack of texture, my camera, or the photographer (there's a guide which can help you).

Choosing the license for your Synth can be done via a dropdown box. It can be licensed under Creative Commons. The team hopes that the CC licenses get used. after you create your Synth you can geolocate it on a map. It's a long way from integrated with Live Maps, but it's a start. You can also embed Synths.

Photosynth's release is bringing on a number of personnel moves. Blaise Agüera y Arcas was the architect of the Live Labs and Photosynth. He founded Seadragon and it was their technology that made Photosynth possible. Blaise will be moving to work for Erik Jorgensen (who used to run the Virtual Earth team and now runs all of MSN) as the MSN Architect. Blaise was also just awarded a TR35 award this week -- congrats! We can expect Synths to show up throughout the MSN network (this could be a big boon to MSNBC).

David Gedye, the Principal Group Manager, and the other members of the Photosynth team are moving to the Virtual Earth team. They will be working in the 3D Imagery group (Radar post) so we can expect some Synthing of the Birds Eye view images (I hope).

Live Labs' release of Photosynth as a product is very significant for Microsoft. Google has long been praised for its integrated research and product development approach while Microsoft has acknowledged that it could use MSR, its research arm, more efficiently. Live Labs, led by Gary Flake, filled with researchers and championed by Ray Ozzie, is one of the ways that Microsoft is trying to bring MSR over to the product. It marks the first successful transition of one of their projects over to product.

Photosynth has two immediate futures. One lies as a standalone product where users will be able to construct 3D models of their homes and objects . The other lies as a backend technology that will be used to supplement Virtual Earth's 3D efforts. Photosynth will have achieved its promise when these two paths are merged and our Synths are being used to populate their 3D world.

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3D Beijing for the Olympics

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 5

Not going to the Olympics, but still want to look around the Bird's Nest? Satellite-imagery supplier DigitalGlobe and GIS modeling and simulation company AEgis Technologies have teamed up with NBC to create a realistic 3D model of Beijing. The result is a 3D city that you can zoom-around in and a portal with an unfortunate URL: http://www.DigitalGlobe-AEgisTG.com.

What I found most interesting about this project was how they built the city. It was a combination of satellite imagery, modeling and an on-the-ground photographer. Using elevation data they created a wireframe of Beijing (first image below). They then overlaid DigitalGlobe's imagery on top (second). Next step involved modeling the buildings (extruding) to create 3D representations of the right height (third). Finally they used over 4,000 photos of the city taken by an NBC photographer on the ground to create the final models (fourth). This all took "took only five weeks to create a 4,500 square kilometer model of the whole of Beijing using 0.61 meter (61 centimeter) imagery" (the lion's share of that went to extruding buildings and building those final models).

At DigitalGlobe's booth at the ESRI User Conference this week they were showing LightInt, their custom geobrowser. It allowed you to fly around the new 3D world. Perhaps most interesting was the ability to see the Line-of-Sight from any spot. I wasn't able to find LightInt on their sites. If you want to explore the world download images, 3D PDFs (which I have found awkward to manipulate), and a Google Earth layer (KMZ file).

If you're at the Olympics this won't be as helpful on the ground as the Map Kiosks will be, but for a virtual tourist it is more advanced than City8's Streetview portal (Radar post).

Radar Theme: Neo-Geo

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Google Maps and Google Earth changed our ideas of what a map on a computer could do for us. We now have tremendously detailed data about the real world and software to manipulate it. Some of the data and code are open, some closed. More and more companies want to connect their products and services to the real world with these data and services.

Watchlist: Google Maps, Google Earth, the open source geospatial community, Where 2.0.