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Links: Mumbai terror tools, G-Speak, Panoramio geobombing

Posted: November 30th, 2008, 12:28am CET
I'm heading off for a week's worth of road-tripping up the Nile, tagging along with some Egyptologist friends. The narrow populated swath along the river should be awash with 3G connectivity, so I plan to stay connected. If I make any good 360-degree panoramas, I'll upload them to 360Cities and post them here.

Meanwhile:
- Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth: "Terrorists used Google Earth" announces India's Business Standard, citing anonymous government sources. Indeed, and RIM Blackberries as well, not to mention boats, energy food, flags and credit cards.
- 3D multitouch User-interface pörn: Oblong Industries' G-Speak:
  
  g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
- Geobombing via Panoramio: One of the photos in the Panoramio layer above the Armenian genocide memorial in Yerevan mocked the genocide, reported PanArmenian.net. Soon after, the photo was removed by Google/Panoramio.
- Pirate maps: This is a bit older, but Ethan Zuckerman, Aid Worker Daily and Google Earth blog all link to interesting maps depicting piracy incidents off the Somali coast and further afield.
- Ancient Rome? Not so much, please: Ancient Rome in Google Earth is supposed to spur on educators to create compelling classroom content, with prizes promised for the best ideas. But for some educators, the dataset is just too unwieldy to be useful. And from my own experience with the layer, I'd have to agree, as currently implemented.
- Bhuvan blowhards: If you need any more proof of what damage poor reporting can do among credulous bloggers, check out how the nonsensical reporting on India's planned web mapping service Bhuvan gets credulously rereported on the usually reliable Foreign Policy blog:
  So, why does India think its program can compete? For starters, Bhuvan users will be able to zoom in on areas as small as 10 meters wide (Google's zoom limit is 200 meters).
  I know I'm preaching to the choir here at Ogle Earth, but is it really all that difficult to just run Google Earth and confirm that you can in fact zoom in to an area that is "as small as 10 meters wide"? Of course, how far you can zoom in is irrelevant — it's the pixel resolution of the imagery that matters.
  
  But Foreign Policy blog is just that — a blog. The real shaming should be of newspapers who report nonsense as fact. The technology section of the London Times, of all places, is squarely to blame:
  The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth.
  At least the Financial Times, though a bit lazy, makes sure we know what's a fact and what's an unverified claim:
  Officials claim that the Bhuvan system will be able to supply more precise images than Google Earth and other services by zooming in to a distance of 10 metres.
  BTW, I haven't seen a single sourced mention of Bhuvan being a 3D virtual globe— it just seems to be assumed that it is because somewhere along the line a comparison was made with Google Earth by someone.
- Google Maps API updated again: Just to make it absolutely clear your first-born will not belong to Google. Nor will your second-born. After that we'll talk.
- More UI pørn: This time, from Microsoft. Behold Second Light, an upgrade of their Surface technology...
- Two Cool visualizations: 1) National University of Singapore's library map is a model 3D built for the Google Earth Plugin. Impressive, but not accessible to Macs. (Via Google Geo Developers' blog) and 2) Google Earth in the Cave, a 3D room-sized visualization, brought to you via VerySpatial.
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Report: Some default Google Earth layers inaccessible from China

Posted: November 27th, 2008, 12:04am CET

[See update below] A credible report on the China-based Moonlight Blog brings news and visual evidence that during the past few weeks, some of the default layers in Google Earth have become inaccessible from behind the Great Chinese Firewall.

This could of course be a temporary ISP problem, or a problem on Google's end, and it's only one report, but given that tunneling to a proxy server outside China restores access to the layers, government censorship is indeed a likely explanation.

If it is censorship, then it is not necessarily an intentional targeting of Google Earth — it could be due to an automated filtering system. The missing default layers are found inside the Gallery and Global Awareness folders — which contain user-generated content and content by organizations with placemarks in China that can be construed as critical of the regime there (see The Elders: Every Human Has Rights). These layers are made of URLs pointing to KML files, which are just machine-readable text files containing, among other things, the texts inside placemark popups — and thus they are susceptible to China's Golden Shield filtering apparatus, which tries to ensure that Chinese netizens are only exposed to state-approved ideas and knowledge.

Another reason why I suspect that the censorship is automated rather that targeted at Google Earth is that the data which is not machine readable — the satellite imagery — is still accessible. So, yes, you can still see sensitive military sites in Google Earth from China; you just can't get Google Earth Community's help in searching for them. It's an interesting development — while the sensitive sites show up in the raw imagery, there is so much raw imagery out there that it isn't very useful unless you have pointers to the good bits, and for that you need access to the layers that contain the collective intelligence of Google Earth users.

Here's hoping that Moonlight Blog keeps us updated on any changes to the kind of content that is available in Google Earth from China.

[Update: 2008-11-27: Others running Google Earth from within China could not reliably replicate this report, so either the problem is not censorship, or intermittent, ad-hoc censorship. It could also be a regional thing.]
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Aussie censorship that wasn't

Posted: November 23rd, 2008, 2:21am CET

It's been a few months since we've had a Google Earth censorship "eruption" so we were definitely overdue the one now underway near Canberra. As usual, the blame lies with the media.

Defence Headquarters Joint Operations Command wiped from Google Earth, begins the article in Australia's Daily Telegraph and reprinted in local papers like Adelaide Now and the Herald Sun. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the buildings in question once were visible on Google Earth but now no longer. You'd be wrong. They never have been, and not because of censorship. Insinuates the article:

Google Earth's images of the surrounding area were taken in 2008, but the Bungendore site itself is represented only by an image taken before October, 2006, when John Howard turned the first sod.

Actually, the region to the East of Canberra where the new HQ lies is a hodgepodge of different imagery. Canberra itself has some fine new aerial imagery from March 2008. Move East, however, and you get DigitalGlobe satellite imagery from October 2006. The region of the HQ is DigitalGlobe imagery from May 2005. Just to the South and East of it is DigitalGlobe imagery from October 2004. (You can tell by zooming in on the imagery and looking at the status bar at the bottom of the screen.)

Much as we'd all like to have the most recent imagery everywhere, that's just not the case. And when sensitive areas fail to be covered by the very latest imagery out there, that does not constitute censorship. And that is the point the Google spokesperson tries to make to the reporter:

A Google spokesman said Defence had not insisted on the image's removal, but it was "not unusual" for old images to be used if they had better resolution than fresh shots.

Imagine that, an outright denial from Google, and it just gets ignored because it gets in the way of a good story. And even if Defence had asked Google, Google wouldn't have been under any obligation to help: A state's jurisdiction does not extend into space, so no country's government has a say over satellite imagery. (And no doubt that is why Australia didn't bother asking.) Had the imagery been aerial, then Defence would have had the authority, but then it would have had to censor the imagery itself before releasing it to the public. That clearly didn't happen here, as Google Earth's attribution to DigitalGlobe shows.

BTW, here is the spot in question. Le Technoblog du LAC has the intel on the precise location of the new HQ:

And here it is on Google Maps/Earth:

View Larger Map

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Another Aussie crater find? Meh.

Posted: November 23rd, 2008, 1:51am CET

In Australia, Google Earth seems to have spurred the popular imagination quite successfully. Perhaps that's because on a per capita basis the country has by far the most high-resolution imagery to gawk over. (Canada has more surface area, but comparatively less of it is in high-res. I'm willing to stand corrected, however, if another country wants to claim this crown.)

We've already had one story this year about an Australian finding and then confirming a meteorite crater using Google Earth. Now Australia's The Age newspaper is going for seconds, reporting on a retired geologist who thinks he's found a crater as well, in northwest New South Wales.

If newspapers wonder why they're dinosaurs on the way to extinction, this article should answer it. The online version is screaming for an embedded Google Map showing you the candidate crater in question, but of course no such tool is made available, letting us blogs run away with the bone:

View Larger Map

Another problem is that the article is premature. The feature hasn't been verified as a meteorite crater, and frankly, to me it looks more like a round ridge of hills. There are plenty of hilly ridges around — some of them will curve. Pre-announcing crater finds is a recipe for egg on face.
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360Cities panoramas now a default layer in Google Earth

Posted: November 20th, 2008, 2:01pm CET

As of this morning, the wonderful panoramas of 360Cities's photographers are available as a default layer in Google Earth. This is the good stuff:-) Apologies in advance for the self-promotion, but:

It's yet another great content addition — one that, just like the Gigapan, Gigapxl and Street View layers, gives a much enhanced "sense of place" when visiting a spot on Earth vicariously. I think I'll go upload all my other ones now!
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Obligatory LIFE Magazine online photo archive post

Posted: November 20th, 2008, 1:04pm CET

Because, yes, they are that awesome. And the archive also includes some nice pictures of maps. Just search for "source:life map". Here's a teaser:

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Cartographica for Mac - GIS for the rest of us?

Posted: November 19th, 2008, 11:38pm CET

ClueTrust, makers of the default free GPS-to-Mac application LoadMyTracks, have today launched a preview of an ambitious new project: Cartographica, a GIS application for the Mac. They're asking for feedback on this currently free download.

I've just given it a spin myself. I found a ShapeFile of Afghani district populations at the wonderful Geocommons library and imported it into Cartographica. After some playing around with the controls I was able to color code them by population like so:

I'm not a GIS pro, so getting results like that in a matter of minutes is a good sign on the ease-of-use front:-)

While it's early days yet for this application, I think it's clear where its makers aim to position it: Not as an ESRI ArcGIS or Manifold competitor, but as something that is good enough for school users, GIS hobbyists and people who georeference their photos — for the last group, Cartographica has menu items like "Timecode Photos from iPhoto Library" and "Plot GPS encoded Photos".

In other words, this application is in the mold of an iMovie or iPhoto for GIS analysis, pushing approachability and ease of use over a full feature set (at least for now). Even the user interface is reminiscent of Apple's i-apps. I don't mean to infer however that the tools are lightweight: There are geocoding tools for addresses, you can set the layer projection (choosing from a long list), acquire WMS and database data directly from the web and of course upload GPX data from a GPS device. (I haven't tried them all, however.)

No word yet on the price, but a discount is promised to those who fill out a survey. In any case, making an approachable GIS application like this available today is a nice way to celebrate GIS Day:-) (Thanks Matthew for the tip)
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Mathematica 7 does GIS

Posted: November 19th, 2008, 12:09pm CET

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:

You can also load your own data for analysis, as Mathematica 7 supports a wide variety of geospatial file formats, including GeoTIFFs, ESRI Shape files and DEM files.

Mathematica also makes it easy for others to explore your work interactively, using the free downloadable Mathematica Player. Here are some sample country data analysis demonstrations for downloading, and here are some city analysis demonstrations. (Some more free geography demos for good measure, including the Traveling Salesman Problem as a game.)

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.
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Earthscape for iPhone: Now your instant georeferenced photo publisher

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 5:35pm CET

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.

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Links: G. William Skinner, buoy data KML, virtual microscopes

Posted: November 18th, 2008, 4:37pm CET
- 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."
  
  I can think of some great civilian uses:-) [Update: The BBC has a good story on it.] (Via Slashdot)
- GeoEye coming to Google Earth in January: All Points Blog notices the mention in a blog post on Portfolio.com.
- YouTube near you: YouTube's API now lets you search by location. Combine this with Google Gears auto geolocation and you get: A YouTube search engine for videos near you. (Via Webmonkey via Via Lifehacker)
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Google SketchUp 7 released

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 11:22am CET

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.]

[Update: Both the Official Google SketchUp Blog and Google LatLong now have the announcement up.]
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Links: Ancient Rome redux, Xenia, Where 2.0 2009, Google Maps API terms

Posted: November 14th, 2008, 3:44pm CET
The Ancient Rome links:
- 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:

View Larger Map

And, Apple confirms that the Egypt iPhone is GPS-crippled. But this too is interesting:

- 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.
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Ancient Rome in Google Earth

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 12:01pm CET

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.

[Update 11:34 UTC: Guest post by Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno on the Official Google Blog (yuck) and the post by Bruce Polderman on Google Lat Long Blog.]
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Links: Virtual globes at AGU, OSM for iPhone

Posted: November 11th, 2008, 10:37pm CET
- Virtual globes at AGU: Virtual globes will be much in evidence at the American Geophysical Union 2008 Fall Meeting on 15-19 December in San Francisco. The topic now has its very own mini website, where heaps of interesting presentations are promised, including KML old hands Valery Hronusov, Richard Treves, John Bailey, Google's Sean Askay, Thematic Mapping Blog's Bjørn Sandvik, Google's technical writer Josie Wernecke and Google's Michael Weiss-Malik.
- 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:
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Links: 32 nearby stars; KML, the book; 3D Warehouse goes 3D

Posted: November 7th, 2008, 1:14am CET
- 32 Nearby Stars: On the other end of the spectrum for virtual universe visualizers, this embedded Flash-based 3D viewer of the 32 stars nearest to the Sun is cool and fun web app. (Via Bad Astronomy)
- KML Handbook: Just released, by Google senior technical writer Josie Wernecke, who also wrote Google's own online documentation for KML 2.x. ($35 on Amazon)
- Election redux: It's official: KML features uploaded to a Google MyMap depict fine in Second Life:
- 3D Warehouse goes 3D: You can now see 3D models using the Google Earth browser plugin, embedded right on the site, announces Google SketchUp Blog.
- Microsoft Virtual Earth gets Photosynth: One now leads to the other in selected places.
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Bhuvan: India's upcoming web map announced, misreported

Posted: November 7th, 2008, 12:44am CET

Bhuvan, which means Earth in Hindu Sanskrit, will be India's home-grown (3D?) web-based satellite imaging and mapping app when it goes live in March 2009, according to Indian media.

What it will do depends on how much faith you have in this media.

According to the Times of India it will let you "count the lions in Gir or fishermen find concentration of fish in the sea." The Times also has nonsensical stuff like:

If Google Earth shows details upto 200 metres distance and Wikimapia upto 50 metres, Bhuvan will show images upto 10 metres, which means you can easily see details upto a three floor high building and also add information.

That's ludicrous, of course, as it is the resolution of the camera that matters. Also, Wikimapia uses Google's imagery, but that's something that has been misreported before.

The Times also has what I sincerely hope is misquote by Indian Space Research Organisation chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair:

"[Bhuvan] will be able to give you an image from only 10 meters away", he said to the excited gathering.

More believably, imagery will be updated every year, and will be of the Indian sub-continent only. The Times also reports that you'll have the option of viewing imagery from different dates, which would indeed be a cool feature.

ExpressIndia reports, meanwhile, has what is very likely another misquote:

The ISRO Chairman said with this service they will have mapping of the entire earth, both in terms of the upper land surface and the exotic minerals down below.

That would be nice, if only it were likely to be true.

Joking aside, DNA India has a properly reported article. Salient points:

The data gathered through Bhuvan will be provided to different government agencies for urban planning, traffic management, crop planning, education and forest planning. The data will be available free to users, but very high resolution and customised precision data will be given to agencies at a cost, [ISRO Chairman] Madhavan added. “Integrated with application-specific Spatial Decision Support tools, the application will open up a new era of collaborative mapping in the country,” he said.

But I think this is unintentionally hilarious:

Technical Transfer Industrial Department head YP Rana said, “In scientific lingo, this is an oven-fresh concept, we are working on the details.

Quite possibly Rana was joking, and the reporter didn't get the joke.

If Bhuvan turns into a web mapping resource that manages to show satellite images of all of India at a constant, say, 2.5 meter resolution, that would certainly be a worthy addition to existing web tools, complementing Google Earth's 15m basemap with 1m DigitalGlobe imagery for urban areas. It will be especially interesting to find those parts of Bhuvan that are censored, as those are the ones we'll all have to go check out in Google Earth for Indian military secrets.
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C3's 3D Oslo: Like bird's eye view, but with tilt, rotate and zoom

Posted: November 6th, 2008, 10:42pm CET

C3, the Swedish company that brought you the automated 3D rendition of Stockholm made from just aerial shots, not LIDAR (blogged back in May) has just released a 3D version of Oslo. Wow:

(High-resolution 30MB WMV version)

The technology has gotten a lot better since May; Oslo exhibits far fewer "molten clock" artifacts, and the sides of buildings are now on the whole uniformly straight. Some errors do still creep in when it comes to vertical textures, but these are not noticeable from a casual perusal.

The overall effect is very impressive — it looks like Microsoft Virtual Earth's bird's eye view, except that you can rotate, tilt and zoom the view at will and keep the correct 3D perspective.

Here are a few more screenshots:

Unlike the embedded viewer used in May for Stockholm, the one used for Oslo is ActiveX-based and does not currently work in Mac and Linux browsers, though plugins for those systems are promised for early 2009. (It does work via VMWare Fusion on the Mac.)

(Some cool hints from the Norwegian instruction manual: Press P to toggle a wireframe view. I toggles rendering info, W/A/S/D is for moving, N/M for zooming, while the arrow keys tilt and rotate.)
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2008 US Elections: Real live results, virtually

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 5:39pm CET

At the House of Sweden in Washington DC tonight, Sweden's TV4 and associated pundits will be covering the election results live as they come in. At the Second House of Sweden, we've taken advantage of the fact that Second Life now supports HTML+Javascript as an object texture to provide similar functionality: We've turned a Google Map into a gigantic live updating billboard, showing the results:

Sure, you can embed the map on a web page, like so:

But only in Second Life can you celebrate (or commiserate) the results socially, in real time, with fellow avatars from all over the world:-) (With thanks to Tina Dahl for her help in SL)
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OpenStreetMap: Your map of last resort

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 10:54am CET

Google Maps' map of Baghdad is sparse (to say the least),

Microsoft Virtual Earth isn't much better,

And Yahoo's is beginning to look familiar:

And yet Google Mapmaker isn't enabled for Iraq. What to do? OpenStreetMap to the rescue!

OpenStreetMap, going where big corporate mapping datasets fear to tread.

(And when you're done with Baghdad, check out Kabul, yet another place where Google Mapmaker isn't enabled: Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Google Maps vs. OpenStreetMap. It isn't even close.) (Idea stolen from Aid Worker Daily, but for a good cause:-)
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Virtual universes compared: Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, Celestia, Hayden's Digital Universe

Posted: October 31st, 2008, 6:45pm CET

A few days ago, Microsoft Research Labs released a major beta update to their free WorldWide Telescope (Windows only). Among its many improvements, the "Autumnal Equinox" release includes a new way of exploring the universe — instead of just zooming in on photographs of the night sky as seen from Earth (as you do with Google Sky), you can now also travel through a 3D model of the Solar System, the stars in our galaxy and out past the furthest observable galaxies and quasars, giving you a fantastic view of the superstructure of the universe.

This is the first time that a 3D visualization of the furthest observable objects in the universe has been made so accessible to the casual user, for free. Similar data has been freely available for a while (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) if you know where to look. In this post I'm going to look at the state of these virtual universes, now that Microsoft has entered this application space.

Microsoft's 3D view of the universe most clearly lends comparison to the current open-source favorite, Celestia (for Windows, Mac and Linux). It too simulates the Solar System and nearby stars, and with a bit of effort you can upload a database of around 250,000 galaxies far far away, taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Microsoft says its galaxy database contains half a million objects, but doesn't name the source. A third free virtual universe worth looking at is Digital Universe, by NYC's Hayden Planetarium, a massive downloadable dataset that comes with PartiView (for Windows, Mac and Linux), its own (highly quirky) viewer.

I most want to compare the view for these three free apps from >1 gigaparsecs out, as this is where it gets to be the most mindblowing, but first let's look at how WWT and Celestia compare on their respective renditions of the Solar System.

WWT beta's Solar System doesn't yet eclipse Celestia's, which is still a much more polished piece of work for this kind of exploration. For example, check out the shadows on Saturn; Celestia doesn't just render the shadow of Saturn on the rings, but of the rings on Saturn, unlike WWT.

Celestia:

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope:

As for moons, WWT only shows our Moon and Jupiter's four biggest ones. Celestia visualizes (with orbits and, where available, surface textures) all the Solar System's known moon, and plenty of asteroids as well. (Minor hitch for Celestia: Saturn's ring-hugging moons stay bathed in sunlight even as they dip into Saturn's shadow, though I'm in not really in a position to nitpick:-)

Celestia is currently also more versatile when it comes to looking at the data — you can fly around in Celestia's universe, as if in a virtual spaceship, at up to millions of light years per second. In WWT you are limited to choosing an object and then zooming and rotating it. Zoom all the way out from any Solar System object in WWT, and you get to see the furthest galaxies, but only ever with the Milky Way at the center of your field of view. (Celestia has other advantages too — your point of view is fully scriptable — but that's beyond the the remit of this article.)

With WWT, however, it is easier than with Celestia to get to see the universe at scales where its superstructure is revealed. There are a few steps involved, however: First, select WWT's new 3D viewing mode, called Solar System:

Then, download the galaxy database in WWT by checking "Cosmos" in the View menu.

You'll then get this ominous-sounding warning:

Luckily, it seemed to work fine on a friend's year-old HP laptop. Once you have the data, start zooming out. When you get to a distance of 1 gigaparsec or more, you start seeing the filaments of galaxies that ring the voids of deep space. Here's a quick 20 second demo of the view of Earth from 2 gigaparsecs out:

Half a million galaxies from Stefan Geens on Vimeo.

The video doesn't do the full screen view justice. As you can see, the available data covers several slivers of the sky as seen from Earth.

If you want a similar view in Celestia, here's what you need to do:

Once Celestia is installed, you need to find and download an extra data package at the Celestia Motherlode. The one we want is on the Extrasolar data plots page, the second version of the SDSS DR2 Galaxies dataset (ZIP file). Unzip this, and put the entire resulting folder into the Extras folder of Celestia's CelestiaResources folder, like so:

Restart Celestia. Then, not too intuitively, you need to go to Celestia's Preference/Control panel, and make sure that the checkbox to show "Nebulae" is set, since that is what the dataset characterizes itself as to Celestia. Now Celestia too shows you the furthest observed galaxies, with the added bonus that you can make loop-de-loops through superclusters of galaxies at crazy speeds in your hypothetical spaceship.

A third approach is more data-centric. Hayden Planetarium makes its Digital Universe dataset available as a free download, together with a viewer, PartiView. (This dataset is also incorporated in a number of professional planetarium applications, such as Sweden's SCISS AB's UniView software. I took a video of a demo of UniView at ISDE5 in 2007).

PartiView is a strange beast. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and IRIX, but its rudimentary interface and affinity for command-line consoles don't win it any beauty or usability contests. PartiView doesn't do fancyful stuff like surface textures of planets — its one strength is the brute force rendering of constellations of particles, which is ideally suited to these kinds of extragalactic datasets. When it comes to this kind of data (of which the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is just one of several datasets available) PartiView can really put on a show:

Hayden Planetarium's PartiView: Lots of galaxies from Stefan Geens on Vimeo.

You will need to RTFM to use PartiView, however.

To conclude: For navigating the Solar System and nearby stars, Celestia still rules, though bear in mind that WWT is beta. WWT provides the easiest path to getting a sense of the size and the composition of the visible universe (if you have Windows), while for those willing to do the work, PartiView offers the most data and can produce some beautiful results.

(For those willing to pay, Starry Night also offers a 3D simulation of the Solar System and nearby stars. I haven't tried it.)
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Egypt's GPS ban: How does it affect the local GIS industry, Nokia and Apple's iPhone?

Posted: October 28th, 2008, 2:26pm CET

Here's an eye opener, courtesy of an article in the Daily Star Egypt:

Today, only three countries in the world still ban the commercial use of GPS: Egypt, Syria and North Korea.

And I happen to have moved to one of them.

I'd previously heard rumors that GPS was banned in Egypt, but paid no heed as I hauled my Nokia N95 and Garmin eTrex around the Western desert in the pursuit of a good blog post. It seemed outlandish to me that mass-produced consumer devices brandishing a specific chip would fall foul of a security law that is so clearly outdated. GPS was made available for civilian use in the US in 1983, and all but this trio of countries soon followed suit.

There are of course plenty of Nokia N95s and iPhones in evidence in the fashionable cafés and bars of Cairo — their absence on the local market simply increases their desirability, with places like Dubai, Beirut, London and Paris catering to demand. Nor is there any danger of arrests or mass confiscations — these GPS-enabled gadgets are owned by the sons and daughters of the country's political and business elite.

The desert expedition industry's dependence on GPS is also tolerated; tourism is the engine of Egypt's economy:

GPS devices are also commonly used in desert safaris. When 19 tourists were kidnapped in the desert between Sudan and Egypt earlier this month, they used their GPS devices to inform authorities of their exact location, which facilitated the rescue operation.

So why would Egypt enact a new telecoms law as recently as 2003 that continues the ban on imports and use of GPS-equipped devices? In brief, because politics in Egypt is dysfunctional, and one of the key players is the notoriously paranoid military. For GPS use to get the green light in Egypt, all kinds of ministries as well the army would have to sign off on the law. Since these institutions are all run as fiefdoms, instead of in the best interests of the state, that isn't going to happen, as Nokia found out:

Last June, Finnish manufacturer Nokia and the Egyptian government were in a row over the decision to ban GPS equipped phones from entering the country.

“We negotiated with the Egyptian government a lot but they insisted on their position and we aren’t responsible for illegal smuggling of banned devices,”

Eddy Rezq, Nokia regional manager, told Al-Masry Al-Youm at the time.

It is not the consumers that are the primary victim of this law — they simply pay higher prices, either on the black market or in the form of a plane ticket. (And let's put things in perspective: The overwhelming majority of Egyptians can't afford these phones, and are much more pre-occupied with getting food on the table than the hypothetical freedom to know their location to within five decimal places. They know where they are. And they aren't going anywhere.)

But local GIS companies, incredibly, are officially making do without GPS:

“Because GPS is illegal, we resort to genuine methods like deploying surveyors in the streets and using satellite images,” Walaa Hassan, head of the geo data department at Dotmap, told Daily News Egypt.

“It would differ very much for our work if we were allowed to use GPS,” Hassan said

Confidence inducing, no? This is not how you develop your way out of poverty.

How should companies like Nokia and Apple respond to the legal constraints of the Egyptian market? (Garmin doesn't have a prayer, of course:-) Nokia's response was to not sell the offending devices, rather than release a crippled version:

“Over 40 percent of all handsets produced by Nokia within the next two years will support GPS-based applications,” [Nokia vice president and director of services and programs] Savander said, adding that it is absurd to consider changing course at this point.

“Who would regress to meet the demands of markets that refuse to keep up with progress when we’re moving at a fast pace towards developing and devising new technologies?” he added.

What about Apple? Well...

The 3G iPhone is coming soon to Egypt, as this placeholder page on Apple.com announces. Curiously, it contains no mention of the three-letter acronym GPS. If you check out a placeholder page for another country where the iPhone is pending, however, such as Jordan, the device's GPS functionality gets a prominent airing. Here's what Egypt's page promises:

Here's what's Jordan's page promises:

So is Apple readying the release of a GPS-crippled iPhone in Egypt? My hunch is yes. Would anybody here buy such a phone? Again, my hunch is yes. For the typical Egyptian user, jailbreaking the 3G iPhone is not a trivial endeavor, and using a foreign phone plan is prohibitively expensive if it is possible at all.

Intriguingly, Apple has also removed the mention of wifi- and celltower geolocation technology from its Egypt placeholder page, not just GPS. Would these functions also be crippled on the Egyptian 3G iPhone? I don't know. Wifi- and celltower-based geolocation services by themselves would still make the Egyptian iPhone a usable location-aware device for most casual users. Without them, not so much.

But perhaps Apple is merely being clever: By selling GPS-crippled 3G iPhones in Egypt, it is carrying out its profit-maximizing duty to shareholders and yet able to blame the Egyptian government if anyone complains. (And it has occurred to me that the GPS chip is still likely to be in iPhones sold in Egypt, though turned off in firmware. That would make jailbreaking the GPS chip possible. I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind especially.)

(Thanks Jan for the link!)
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Google Earth for iPhone redux

Posted: October 28th, 2008, 12:28pm CET
Three things:
- Avi Bar-Zeev, one of the original programmers on Keyhole Earth, which b

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