Tom Churchill

Today’s mashups are going to get a lot better because the tools to view them will become a lot bette.

[Showing a video of a dashboard device]

Earthscape Augmented Reality System - built for a geobrowser, for a google earth application. Infra-red cameras that are suspended from police helicopters. Imagine you’re a cop in a helicopter looking at video from the camera. They’re responsible for manging the chase. They were using a moving map to show where the camera was looking. A 2D map vaguely linked into the gimble. Video on one side, map on other. The location could be wrong because the orientation was wrong and the perspective was wrong.

If you can pick them up on the camera you don’t want to lose them. Picture of hardware, IMU, motherboard, battery. Drove it around in a van then got time with the police.

Actually not as fun as you expect. Helicopter flies very aggressively. You’re probably going to get sick. The hardware might not act as you expect. They were writing code in the air while pulling 2.5Gs and flying around. If you know which way the helicopter and camera are pointing then you know how to render the view in a geobrowser. You get a computer generated image that looks like what you’d see on the monitor. Because it’s all computer generated we can add useful information. The big win comes from simple things. If you turn off the aerial imagery and replace it with the live video. You can overlay the streets on top of the video. We could give the officers the precise address of a property and they could find a gun.

Next demo showing polygon data being overlaid. Showing individual properties and addresses being overlaid on video.

This can sometimes be fun if it’s a quiet night.

Want to go back to where we started. Early day of geobrowsers, can verify by the amount of change we see. Google adding street view, MS with their 3D buildings. Takes you back to the early 90s when web browsers were changing rapidly.

Geo browses are fantastic on the desktop. But they can save lives out on the field. Augmented reality goes out much further, aiding fire departments, rescue workers.

Earthscape is a way for us to test our geobrowsers engine, solving the problems that people in the field might want to do with it. The process of using our own API improved the product. To do anything more interesting that display dots on the map you need something that’s programmable. You could do this using KML. It’s like in the pre-JavaScript days. The J in AJAX makes everything so interesting.

First responders have little tolerance for their tech not working.

Lastly, you don’t see a lot of long development cycles. Develop for the very high end with the expectation that things will catch up. They had to build for older rugged machines, but this allowed them to quickly develop for the iPhone.

Augmented Reality Lets the DPD Know Where You Are

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