-
Where 2.0: Digital Cities
Doug Eberhard
Want to talk about digital cities. Probably heard Geoff Zeiss talk about construction industry. Here to talk about the cities that we live in. We must change our ways in our cities to be sustainable.
Like other times we’ve moved from “Old Way” to “New Way”, e.g. Analog to Digital. We still pass contracts around using paper for instance.
We build actual models of buildings, we really need to get into virtual intelligent models.
Talked yesterday about building information models that people can now share to find and fix expensive problems on the computer before going out on site. Communities are now sharing rich 3D and geospatial information models.
As we think about intelligent city models will share 4 ideas about autodesk digital cities.
visual Model, digital platform, improved workflow, smarter way to plan.
Smart models, smart-alec models, they talk back to us.
Today’s 3D GIS models
3D visualization models are rarely used after the project, mainly just for visual images.
Tomorrow’s models are a reality today, convergence of CAD and BIM, GIS. To combine perspectives together to create informed decisions. Seattle animation shows what the city will look like with tunnel or elevated roadway. Allows people to improve on that city.
Sacramento model shows existing environment, proposing high speed rail, these animations show the public what this will look like in very non-technical way for very technical way. Buildings show up coming from planning authority, they’re geospatially accurate. Visualization shows how it will work, allows us to get inside the model. Can be sure it will be accurate and trustworthy.
Also ability to analyse and simulate to make informed decisions. Previously it would be artists creating models. In these models cars are being driven by simulation. You can actually see how transportation system will work, Sustainability analysis, wind patterns, energy patterns. Rich hi-fidelity data sets brought together allow this analysis.
Pollution visualisation, flood simulation.
Allow richer integration and analysis using these digital cities. Allows to simulate and predict operations. Saves money.
Wondering what to put in your digital city. Digital sustainability. We should continue to build these rich hi-fidelity models instead of using paper all the time, but we should be reusing these models.
“Be a Model Citizen” www.autodesk.com/digitalcities
Technorati tags: digital, cities, visualization, simulation, where, where2.0, where2008
-
Where 2.0: Veriplace: Acquiring and Sharing Consumer Location
Scott A. Hotes
WaveMarket helps people to manage location.
Problem of locating a handset is one of triangulation.
“Acquiring the information necessary to locate a wireless device typically requires close access to the underlying wireless operator.”
Two reasons - 1st question of privacy and security, don’t want just anyone knowing this information, lots of liability; 2nd reason, value, the information is very valuable.
Accessing a handset can sometimes be done without the carrier, e.g. RIM and windows mobile have built in GPS, a resident application can access location without interacting with the carrier, but the vast majority of cellphone GPSes use assisted GPS which needs the carrier.
Getting information for doing cellular triangulation is very similar but different.
“Leveraging our experience with Family Locator: privacy expertise, technical intergration, trust; in creating a developer environment.”
The technical integration experience, privacy expertise, carrier partners, we’re taking that experience and exposing it for 3rd party developers. That’s what Veriplace is all about.
Consider an application like locating friends on facebook. At some point the friend will need to opt in to the service. If the user isn’t the owner of the friend’s handset then interaction flow will need to pass to the account holder, perhaps the parent. This is the type of thing that the developer doesn’t want to handle. That’s what Veriplace handles for you.
-
Where 2.0: Earth-Browsing: Satellite Images, Global Events and Visual Literacy
Lisa Parks
Usually at academic and arts conferences. I’m a media studies scholar, interested in the use and development of satellite technologies from citizens’ point of view. Try to dream about what type of satellite development in the public interest might look like. Came from my interest of public interest TV, what does public interest satellite look like?
Showing an artist based in berlin and start installing physical google markers in places.
Interested in satellite image orders by individual consumers. Dan Bollinger tried to get satellite images to show Survivor.
KFC requested an Ikonos image of their new logo that they did huge in Nevada.
Use of GPS to “plot the personal”, and generate unique “movement signatures”.
The way that the planet is now being crisscrossed by satellite footprints and wireless footprints. How we don’t just map the world in terms of countries, states, blocks, but also coverage footprints which are sometimes more important.
“Cultures in Orbit” - Lisa Parks’ book.
“Part of my research has focused on specific uses of satellite imagery in the news media to represent global conflicts and events”
4 questions: images used to represent global conflicts? Where does authority to use come from?…
Satellite images showing alleged mass graves in Bosnia. Appeared in papers and press after declassification. Problems are that the images acquired during the atrocities, from a safe haven that was overrun, 8000 muslim men were allegedly driven away and buried in mass graves. Problem was of an overload of satellite information and techniques were not good enough to make the images useful in a timely fashion. Detailed investigation of this timeliness.
Also look into imaging of refugees, requests were made for images to be released to show the situation in Rawanda. People began to pay attention.
War in Iraq, 2003-present - Colyn Powell’s infamous presentation about WMD before the war began. Use of the images in powerpoint in UN council chambers. Scathing critique was given of these images weeks after this. This compromises the ability of US to use these images with credibility.
Showing Google Earth & USHMM “Crisis in Darfur [layer]” - interested in the shifting function and role of satellite image as it circulates in the popular culture. Data about activities happening in the region together with photos.
Looking at case studies over 10 years there’s an eclipsing of the satellite imagery, in earlier media there was a focus on the image as the site of scrutiny, these days the satellite image becomes a wallpaper and the closer views are privileged over the satellite image. Showing that the image is no longer interesting, it’s the zoom through to the detail. These alternative images may perpetuate bad images of e.g. Africa whereas unfiltered satellite images did not do this so much.
As images become mass media, more and more citizens use them to understand the earth, but most are not interpreting the imagery and know little about it and its uses. Visual and technological literacy problems.
Citizens have a right to know how these are used.
Developers can help citizens, by embedding metadata. Would be great to get the source, sensing instrument, infra-red, spectral, owner, date, orbital address, proprietary status. Helps to understand imaging more effectively. Now being done some by google earth. These graphics reveal how it occurs, show that satellites don’t hover, they pass over. Gives a historical record on satellite imagery acquisition.
We need better maps of orbital space, of satellite traffic, of the dynamic activity or earth and orbit.
[Slide showing satellites being used for TV transmission during Yugoslavia war]
Multiple other representations. Showing photo of US 193, satellite that was shot down by US. Talking about Trevor Paglen trying to find out about things we’re not meant to know about, he took a photo of this satellite and does more investigation.
Earth-Browsing: Satellite Images, Global Events and Visual Literacy
Technorati tags: satellite, imagery, art, where, where2.0, where2008
-
Where 2.0: Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers
David Troy
Twittervision got a lot of attention, sorta explained twitter. A way to show the world in a new way. Similarly flickrvision got a lot of attention. Shown in the museum of modern art. Spinvision.tv takes youtube videos and puts onto a flash player.
Twittervision local shows more local versions, also flickrvision local coming together.
Got me thinking a lot about all this data I’ve collected, what can I do with it? Photos and tweets in a particular area. Thought about a personal tricorder to see what’s around you, scan your local area. Frankly though it was a large amount of data it wasn’t large enough. Was thinking about what else out there could help this. Too may walled gardens of people approaching this, maybe there’s a way to link this? Came up with openlocation.org.
Suppose you land in Chicago, as you’re taxiing you take out your cellphone to find out what’s happening in Chicago, are friends available, events, places you’ve been recommended to go? Only solution is to scour bunch of websites and you won’t be able to do it quick enough. You need to be able to just say “what’s up in Chicago”. Find your friends, find the bar, meet your friends, you can do all that on the way to the gate.
This is a really hard problem, I liken it to being in jail, you get one call, you need to find the information straight away. This is case where you don’t care about maps, you care about proximity.
Problem is there’s a huge amount of information. Google’s geosearch will return results based on a basic page ranking but we don’t know how that works. Maybe we need to do this based on your social graph. All this enhances quality of life, if you can take out mobile and get complete picture of your surroundings.
Maybe it’s not a business, maybe it’s a technology or a protocol. If twitter was invented in 1994 it would’ve been given a port number. So maybe this needs to be a technology or protocol. We need to look at this as not simply a business.
We’re announcing openlocation.org. A lot of developers don’t get geo. Developers will give you many different approaches. We need to start a conversation on how to approach problems and agree on toolsets. Don’t want people to try to lock up data to become the facebook of LBS.
Need to think a lot about this, how do users interact with this. Make sure it’s simple unlike OpenID(?) More like Maker Faire, less like IETF.
Need to agree on goals. Openlocation.org is a community to bridge geo community with the web. Psychology. Sometimes maps are not great. Location relationship is important. This is a hard problem that we need to iterate on.
“Wrestling with Angels!”
GeoHash, lat lon converted to hash that removes accuracy as you remove digits from the end.
Got lots of important people involved. Get on the google group and get involved.
Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers
Technorati tags: openlocation, open, location, where, where2.0, where2008
-
Where 2.0: Emerging Opportunities on the GeoWeb
Dev Khare
We’ve heard a lot of good ideas over the last 2 days, there’s a lot of innovation going on in the geoweb, geomobile, geocar, geovoice. Very hot with the investor community today. Look at how existing business opportunities can give us an advantage, and other areas to invest in.
“Geo is Impacting Many Industries” Tech, Auto, Logistics, Real Estate, Sports, Travel, Telecom, Media, Advertising, Retail
Consumers are paying for technology up front in Auto, in Retail.
These are some examples of the bigger picture.
“Many (New) Ways to Consume Geo” Laptop, Mobile, PND, Ambient, On person, Marine, Outdoors, Paper
PNDs 30 million to be sold this year, up 30% from last year. Mentioning Dash, Garmin, Tom-Tom, reckons the latter two will announce connected device. Ambient is more bleeding edge. Chumby. All getting connected.
Jumping into the geoweb. Big players, but smaller companies can succeed in these areas. Geobrowsers, in each of these layers there’s a number of these companies competing. What we look at is the key distribution deals that you can get with the bigger media players. In terms of entrenched players, Yellow pages can be disrupted. Existing online ad networks can be disrupted, noone’s cracked location based ads. Location brokers. Google is a browser company in this world, with google earth.
Some of the business models apart from advertising: subscriptions, virtual worlds, commerce.
Geo-mobile, GPS chip prices have dropped which is interesting, down to $2 down from $100-200.
A lot of the infrastructure here is entrenched, looking at investing.
30m cars in the US that are not connected, looking at digital cars/geocar a lot. People spend 60 hours in the car each month, more than TV. 70% of radio is listened to in the car. $27B consumer electronics is car. When was the last media company for the car created? Last thing would really be satellite radio. Telematics, voice based services serving the car, can be disrupted by automated voice recognition. People are paying, drivers are paying. Often subsumed into price of the car so consumers don’t feel the pain. Location based advertising is big with the car as you can deliver the person to the door.
GeoVoice - directory assistance is local search in different words. These are all cash cows or telecoms companies and they’re not changing fast enough.
Emerging markets - mobile and voice are growing in Africa, South America, India, China, Middle east. Opportunities are map building, POI databases. People pay in multiple ways, premium SMS, trading “minutes”.
Slide showing many companies being funded/purchased.
Every company in the world needs maps and don’t get the attention that everyone else gets.
-
Where 2.0: History's best geohacks
Chris Spurgeon
I’m not a professional historian but I’m a science history junkie. Come back time and time again to the geo-scientists who are unique to this great mix, politics, maths, navigation, others…
Will be talking about 3 hacks that are particularly cool.
Hack #1. Squaring the circle - Gerald de Cremere - changed his name to Gerardus Mercator. He was an extraordinary artist, made highly detailed maps, one of the best engravers. Also superb if not the best globe maker on earth at the time.
Washington Irving invented “historical fiction” he invented this story that Columbus discovered that the world was round.
Back to mercator - lived in a volatile town, lived around Netherlands/Belgium. Martin Luther came along and challenged the Christian church. Mercator also did the same and was tossed into prison for being a heretic. He literally didn’t know if he was going to be tortured or killed. Fortunately after 7 years he was released from prison. His teachers vouched for him. He learned that to “Always stay on good terms with your thesis advisor”. He returned to his profession of map making, dealt with the issue that cartographers have found there’s an issue that the earth is spherical and maps are usual flat. They found it’s basically impossible to combine the two without distortion. These things are called projections. Mercator invented “the mercator projection”. All projections have imperfections. Mercator’s is that things really stretch out as you get to the top of a map. Why was this so important? What was it like to sail back then? Could you tell direction? Yes - compasses. Could you tell how far you’d gone? Kinda - measure your wake. Could you measure your latitude? Absolutely, by measuring the angle of the sun/stars. Could you measure longitude? No, noone could figure out how. Given you can measure distance and latitude, he used these tools to design a map.
Let’s pretend we’re sailing from London to New York. You start North West and end up South West. If you plot it on a mercator map, it’s a weird curve. If you were sailing you’d need to modify your compass direction and you’d need to know your longitude to do that. What if you draw a line that’s always the same compass bearing, but perhaps isn’t the shortest direction. If you plot that on a mercator map, it’s a straight line. That’s very important for navigation. The calculations to figure out lon/lat to position on a map is essentially very simple. That’s why it’s so often used right now.
Hack #2. Does anyone really know what time it is?
People were literally dying to find out what their longitude is. People were dying as ships crashed because they didn’t know accurately where they were. The British government established a prize to solve this problem. They would give someone 20,000 pounds to define longitude within a single degree. Lots of crazy people came out of the woodwork. One guy said take a litter of puppies, put one puppy on the shore, and one on the boat, if you burn one at noon the other will yelp. If you knew the time accurately between England and the ship you could measure the longitude by looking at the sun. John Harrison was completely aware of this so figured out all he had to do was make an accurate clock. That’s really difficult, especially at sea, pendulum clock won’t work as it’ll swing about. Spring clock will get hot and cool.
He built this clock - H1 - exists at the Grenwich museum. He built the clock over severallyears then went to the Longitude board and asked for a sea trial. They sailed from England to Lisbon using the clock to work out their direction. Worked well but they decided this wasn’t a big enough test. This pissed him off. He improved it a bit, made a few more versions, 4th version of the clock, 25 years later - the H4 - this is a masterpiece, bit bigger than a pocket watch. Goes back to the board and says “lets try again”. They sailed with the clock in a box and can only be wound when it’s in a box to make sure they didn’t cheat. Sailed to Jamaica, Bermude and back. The error was about 1/3 of a degree. “You ever tried being paid by the government?” They make him sail it again so this time his son sails to Barbados. The clock loses a 1/5th of a second per-day. He sails back, this time the longitude board says he has to do it again. By now he’s really getting pissed, but King George Vth hears the story and decides he has to get his money, which he does shortly before he dies.
Takeaways:
- You can look at the world in a new way, the way Mercator did, invent a new way of seeing.
- Increased precision, increased accuracy changes the way we work. [JMCK: sorry, didn’t quite get this]
-
Where 2.0: Google Maps = Google on Maps
Lior Ron
Showing some observations from Where 2.0.
- Slides are bad (1)
- Simple ideas are good(1)
- Demos are better (5)
- Launches are best! (9)
Started with the base layer, the tiles, satellite imagery, streetview. Canvas on which to load more and more data. We’ve added something pretty simple, businesses, left hand side now shows popular maps/collections, including Places of Interest. This allows me to light up all of the Indian restaurants in the US, maybe the seafood places too, try Steak housees too (loads!). Showing search results as a layer instead of just 10 results at a time.
Now you have a map, you have some businesses. I want a better understanding.. We’re announcing a new layer menu (“More…”), let’s pick wikipedia, now we see all the wikipedia entries in the US. Can click on one, zoom in, can see a snippet from the article. Can also do searches and the icons stay on the map. Burlingame is the second richest county in the state and 14th in the country. Can also see Panoramio photos, that shows all the photos around the world on a layer, can click on them to see what’s there. See canyons in arizona to moonrises in alaska. Can browser the universe, browse the whole world. These are both available in the layers menu on google maps.
Another way to explore this content is in search. Did a search for SFO previously, lets try San Francisco. After every search we see a bubble called “explore” on the left, can see photos, popular searches, user created maps in the area. Clicking on “explore this area shows more information that will be updated as we browse the map. Getting panoramio photos, but also get youtube videos and can see them in context. Annotating and getting a better sense of a place, all from within google maps. More interesting data that is exposed through this ability is the “my maps”. Someone showing the 49 miles city drive in San Francisco. Another my map of the famous Bullitt car chase with lots of information about it. While we browse the map, the info updates. Lots of useful info. Two new ways we’re uncovering that allow the users to view content and get access to it.
Now we have wikipedia on maps, we have photos and video on maps.
Other new content coming is search options, can specify “Real Estate” and see more than 5M listings of real estate data. Can filter the results.
So that’s available today as another type of content available on google maps.
Another option available is “mapped web pages”. Web pages that we’ve extracted data from. Searching for “UFO sightings in united states”, we’ll get a list of web pages talking about ufo sightings. For web pages that are exposing coordinates on the page.
So we have the web on google maps.
There’s one data source missing, we’re asked all the time when we’ll be able to read news on the map, I’m happy to announce that starting next week we’ll have a google news layer on google earth and will allow users to view news in a geographical fashion. Can see the context on google earth. Can click the markers and read the whole article from within google earth.
News can be countrywide, general and very very specific. Here’s the news from Burlingame. The 3rd Burlingame bank was robbed yesterday - links to the second richest county thing from earlier. There’s google news coming out of burlingame too. “Google opening geo-search”, “GIS exec works to unlock hidden geodata” - Jack’s talk from yesterday. Hyper-local news available from next week.
All these datasources coming to maps. It’s not only google maps, it’s google on maps.
The place that this data is talking about is the common denominator about these data sources. We’re launching the ability to view all of the data from in one place. Opened an info bubble about the “Palace of Fine Arts” and it shows all the news, images, all the info. Maps in a bubble on a map. Upcoming events, happening in the palace of fine arts. What’s unique, even if we don’t know about a place, we create a place based on the geodata. We didn’t know about the “Giant pink bunny” in Italy but we managed to make a page all about it. Exposing all the geodata that we have on the giant pink bunny. More data, in more places.
To wrap up, this is all aggregated, we’re very pleased to announce that this is open, meaning that all of this will be searchable from the local search api. Giving an example, a hiker site that aggregates trails on the web. What we can add to this is a search box and we can search the geoweb and see results from all the place, or do a restriction to only a bounding box specified by your site, or to only the content on your site.
Last announcement - top feature requested by API developers - the API is now available as Flash(!)
Technorati tags: google, maps, search, map, flash, where, where2.0, where2008
-
Where 2.0: Liveblogging in a high traffic environment
Just thought I’d mention, we’re having major problems with the network at Where 2.0 today so my notes have been lagging heavily. Hopefully it’s going to be better this afternoon, if not I’ll continue to take offline notes and upload them later.
-
Where 2.0: Crawling the web for GeoData
Juan Gonzalez
Planeteye started by looking around at the world of information available in the form of mashups. Heard from Google earlier, already > 50,000 using their google maps api. Can only imagine how many data points are available. Would be interesting if crawler could go and collect the data that’s published.
Google has MyMaps, hear there’s > 9 million my maps created by the public.
Highly structured data that is behind these mashups.
Location information not always structured in this way. Are other methods, like an address. Example from NYT referring to a physical location. Easier to crawl address but presents a number new challenges. This is just as valuable as the adjoining google map.
Problem with addresses is that they come in many formats. When analysing worldwide information you can come across many addresses. Humans can figure things out, but not machines.
We experimented with a number of techniques. We tried low-resolution geocoding. Everyblock mentioned going beyond the point marker. We’re going the same way, with these addresses it’s probably possible to get an accurate location, but easier to get a general location. We’re allowing for that exercise and assume we won’t always know the location.
Not the same as geotagging to a centerpoint, different technique. Improves our chances of managing some geocoding though.
Next challenge is the same place being referred to in many different ways. All the different examples will be referring to exactly the same point. The challenge is how to work out they’re the same things. Location is not enough, have to look beyond that. Telephone, elements of the name, etc. can help with this.
Once we have the ability to match the place we can start defining implicit lengths between the multiple sites referring to the same location. If this goes well we’ll end up with a very large number of data points. Current visualization techniques tend to work in two ways: very large dataset would need breaking down and show a few points at a time - good for end user but doesn’t give context of all datapoints; other approach is to put them all on the map and hope for the best - that quickly becomes useful.
Have the ability to take the entire dataset and allow the user to appreciate it, [using circles that get bigger when there’s more elements around a location]. Doesn’t matter how many points there are, they’re returned at the same speed.
We’re trying to create a travel guide by pulling in all the travel information on the web at PlanetEye
Technorati tags: crawling, geodata, planeteye, where, where2.0, where2008
-
Where 2.0: Lessons Learned in Location-based Gaming
Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak
Geocaching has been around since 2000, thousands of geocaches. Billion dollar technology to hide plastic containers in the woods. Can use any GPS unit.
Have millions of people using this all the time.
Wherigo - taking geocaching and bringing it into a virtual game.
- A toolset for creating media rich experiences in the real world using GPS and handheld devices.
- Taking adventure games outdoors (“tricking people to go outside an get some sun”)
- Taking mashups outdoors
Unlike traditional computer games: Making people go outside, may factors beyond your control.
Simplify technology requirements.
- Alternate options for determining location
- Reduce need for high accuracy
- Take advantage of the novelty of location
Encourage user-generated content
- Integrate community content
- Take advantage of local experts
- Users will localize the playing experience
- Inspire “Junkyard Wars” design - trying to create an experience out of the location rather than something that works everywhere
Players are manic-depressive
- Physical activity creates strong emotions
- Educate, motivate and reward often (dumb it down)
- Consider your actions with your community
Keep games short First games where 1.5-2.5 hours, way too long
- Mirror casual game design - lunchbreak games, reward them
- < 30 minutes is best
- “Serialize” your game into chapters
- Simplify, simplify, simplify.
You can’t control the player
- A player can and will go to any length to finish a game
- Unexpected environmental factors
- Reward often, punish carefully
Encourage players to look up
- Interact with real world objects We have people watching to make sure people cross roads correctly
- Notify with vibration and sound
- Use reference imagery
- Reduce reliance on the arrow
- Use maps
Building momentum takes time
- “If you hide it they will come”
- Target locally but encourage global play
Consider environmental issues
- foot traffic
- stampede
- negative perception of non-players
- …
Be aware of legal grey areas
Lessons Learned in Location-based Gaming
Technorati tags: groundspeak, geocaching, gaming, where, where2.0, where2008
subscribe via RSS or via JSON Feed