Anthony Fassero, Earthmine

We all agree that there’s a renaissance happening for mapping, an explosion of online geo-spatial platforms that allow us to visualise dense layers of data. Also allow us to attach information to these frameworks.

The baselayer allows us to enable this connection of data. Satelite imagery is precisely registered to the earth’s surface, we can work out the coordinate for every pixel. We can do the same for bird’s eye together with some advanced computation.

Also more recently street view. Street view doesn’t really link to the base layer, you don’t really have a lat/lon/altitude for the imagery. Showing a video of a 3d rendering from street imagery. Stereophotogrammetry. There’s so much information, curbs, etc. that it can’t be delivered too easily.

base layer = resolution + fidelity + accuracy

there’s a wealth of information but we need to be able to percieve it, e.g. text. Fidelity, we need 1-1 pixel to coordinate information.

generative, we’re able to extract road and building information.

[demo]

3D view on a bridge, can be dragged around similar to google street view. Can also double click on features in the image and it will jump to the nearest location. Start on bridge, click on a building at a distance and it jumps to that view, seems like spiderman jumping from point to point. Can also search for features, “gas lamps”, geocodes. Can also click on traditional overhead map/imagery and can be taken to that point.

Can also link to new imagery. Can click on an image and add a point, labelling it as a “bakery”. We’re actually tagging this on 3D imagery so you can rotate the image around and the point stays possible.

Can also do measurement. Dragging a line can give you a measurement, e.g. lane width. Can also take snapshots of nice views, virtually taking photos. Can measure the height of a (small) building. Tagging a manhole, street light. These are also showing up on the traditional inset map. Exporting this, exported as KML and loaded in google earth. This information isn’t stuck in the image but is really generating real world coordinates.

We’re also looking to provide data services to distribute this data. Software and tools to allow integrating it.

Announcing APIs JS and Flex: www.earthmine.com/beta

Indexing Reality: Creating a Mine of Geospatial Information

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