The Balloon Project is charming in its simplicity - Luca and Ira send a video camera up into the sky hanging from helium balloons chasing it from below on bikes - and the results are fantastic.
The project has covered various cities around the world, below is the capture of Amsterdam from July 2008:
Carrying on the theme is Berlin, in their own words:
It was a rainy afternoon in Berlin and our last chance to do The Berlin Balloon Project since Luca (one of the co-founders of The Balloon Project) was leaving the next day. We strapped more than 30 helium balloons to a video camera and sent it up all by itself over the city some few hundred meters. We then proceeded to chase it down with bikes as the rain slowly brought it back to earth. Watch "The Chase" to see how it looked from the ground:
Google Earth is a natural yet still underused place for urban planners to communicate the future of cities. With the addition of the timeline feature it is possible to chart development according to phases of growth. This is exactly what a company in the Netherlands has done to illustrate the proposed changes to the station are in Utrecht.
We have captured and embedded below a short movie illustrating the use of the timeline feature:
The demo reel above is from 'Pixeldreams: Architectural Visualization Services'.
Pixeldreams, is a company based in Barcelona, Spain with representatives in London, Dubai and Abu Dhabi that has, since 1998, specialized in the creation of virtual renderings and animations for all types of architectural projects.
The soundtrack has been disabled by YouTube due to breach of copyright, it is always wise to check your copyright on demo reels before uploading to video sharing sites - MP3 Unsigned is well worth a look in this respect.
We are revisiting this earlier work due to a meeting today with regards creating visualisations of the London Underground. The work started out with the movie below of the traditional tube map. Created direct from a .pdf file via London Transports website it provided a 'quick and dirty' flythrough of the map:
We then looked at creating a geographical version with the aim to morph in 3D between the two.
Pictured below is the layout so far using Google Maps 'without the map'. Aimed at creating a 'plasticine' look to the routes the interactive image below illustrates a work in progress produced so we can easily identify the errors. Double click to zoom in and drag to pan:
There are a few errors here and there but it should only need a few tweaks to be near a complete version which can then be morphed and changed as needs be.
Thanks go to Simon Clarke who produced the original geographic tube map. Simon's site is currently under reconstruction in the meantime take a look at other London Underground diagrams.
Leo Burnett's campaign for Shelter - the Homeless and Housing charity entitled the 'House of Cards' campaign is designed to raise awareness of the fragililty of the UK housing situation. Radiohead donated one of its tracks - Videotape from the In Rainbows album and voiceover is by Academy Award nominated actress, Samantha Morton, who herself experienced homelessness before she became famous.
The film was shot by Dom and Nic from Outsider and post-production by Framestore, everyone donated their services and time for free in support of this very worthwhile charity.
Readers of the blog will know that we don't normally do book covers, but like buses you wait for ages and then two come along at once. So following on from the Virtual Geographic Environments cover we present Land Value and Taxation: Theory, Evidence and Practice:
The cover design was by Peter Holm at Stirling Hill Productions with the illustration courtesy of our Greeble City. For those interested we also provided the illustration for The English Legal System by Gary Slapper and a work of romantic fiction published in Ireland uses our panorama of the K6 Telephone Box. Sadly we lost the title of that one when moving mail boxes a while ago so if anyone knows of it do get in touch...
Last week we posted on our 'Greeble Earth' image as proof of concept for a book cover and by way of an update the proofs are back from the publishers as illustrated below:
We have a chapter in the book entitled 'TheRenaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life', it should be available in the next couple of months and should you buy it at least your know how the cover was created...
See the Greeble Earth post for the original image and link to the tutorial.
Picked up via Engadget (we know we should be doing better things with our time...) the movie below details DIS.PLAY a flexible display consisting of foam and force sensors which is deformable. The system works with the parameters position and time like other touch screens as well, but in addition to that, it reacts, above all, on the intensity of pressure:
Combine this with a Geographical Information System and a whole number of possible scenarios come to mind such as trying out fluid motion in terms of flooding scenarios by raising or lowering the land....(?)
We like iClone, the 3D creation program that allows avatars to be lip synced and placed in 3d scenes, its perfect for story telling, presentations and pre-visualisation. Indeed we have recently used it in a grant bid, sometimes 3D avatars are better at communicating to an audience than 6 sides of A4 paper.
As such their new City Elements series of 'props' are of note providing modern New York style streets with Building System that can be connected and combined. The pack includes 12 buildings and 11 shops allowing the creation of a mid-rise neighborhood.
The movie below provides an insight:
The pack also includes props such as traffic signs and street lights with glow textures for users to make more realistic lighting effects. Their 'How to Make Your Own City' page is well worth taking a look at.
High Dynamic Range panoramas should, in our view, be a first stop for any visualization of architecture, planning or design projects. They are quick to capture and provide a useful context for off site meetings or online communication of design. In addition they can be used as the basis for 3D modeling, complete with realistic lighting via the HDR capture.
The image above is of St John's Church in Hampstead - a Grade I listed building and has stood on the site since 1823 in an architectural style more reminiscent of New England than London churches of its time.
Click 'Load' and drag to look around, select 'Open' to view full screen.
'As a proprietary chapel, St John's is recognised as a church within the London Diocese of the Church of England but has complete independence in financial matters. It receives no support from and makes no contribution to Diocesan Funds. It is entirely self supporting and all costs, including staff and building costs, are borne by the congregation which has owned the building since 2003 when they bought it from the family trust which had owned it and leased it to them since the First World War'.
You can view a higher resolution version of the panorama via our Flickr Group.
Tilt Shift photography is perfect for creating pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs. Thankfully you no longer need an expensive lens or a moderate level of expertise with Photoshop to make them thanks to Tilt Shift Maker.
Tilt Shift Maker is a free service that allows you to upload photographs up to 4Mb in size or 4096 x 4096 resolution and set the size/area of blur to create the tilt shift effect. Once your happy with your creation simply click 'download' to get a full size tilt shift image back.
Its a really neat service and completely free, you can use any photograph but oblique angles work well for tilt shift, as such Google Earth or Virtual Earth are perfect for trying out the effect.
Google Earth 5 is impressive - its allows movies to be made in minutes that before would of taken a couple of days in a high end 3d package. The movie below was captured in real-time using the Sun Cycle combined with NASA's night time imagery.
The addition of day time imagery to the clip would be a simple case of re-recording using a fixed flightpath and superimposing with the standard earth view. However, we really like the lighting effects of the night cycle combined with the city lights thus the rough cut below:
As a contrast our movie of population density in the UK, below, was visualized in After Effects and took around 3 hours to complete. If we had imported it into Google Earth we could of gained a similar effect in a few minutes.
Google Earth 5.0 includes a view of the ocean bed and as such it allows global access to data that before its release was only available to specialist communities. As such it allows anyone in the world to look at put forward their own analysis which in turn opens up possible new discoveries - such as the possible finding of 'Altantis' in an area area known as the Madeira Abyssal Plane.
Discovered by spotted by aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford as he browsed through Google Ocean the layout certainly appears man made and does open up questions of a lost city on the seabed.
The feature is quite notiable in Google Earth - you can zoom in direct with our file Atlantis.kml (right click to 'save as' and then open in Google Earth).
You can read full details in The Sun - we like the way they have manged to include a picture of Patrick Duffy with the story...
***Update***
As commented by M@ the Daily Mail are now running the view that 'the photo, taken using Google's latest gadget, Google Ocean, is nothing more than thin bands of sonar data collected by boats mapping the ocean floor' - the see The Daily Mail for full info.
We still like to think its a lost city found by the power of the crowd.... :)
We came across a paper this morning on Dynamic Virtual Textures by Javier Taibo, Antonio Seoane and Luis Hernánde from the research group VideaLAB at the University of Coruña.
As they state in the abstract the real-time rendering of arbitrarily large textures is a problem that has long been studied in terrain visualization. For years, different approaches have been published that have either expensive hardware requirements or other severe limitations in quality, performance or versatility. The biggest problem is usually a strong coupling between geometry and texture, both regarding database structure, as well as LOD management.
Their work paper presents a new approach to high resolution, real-time texturing of dynamic data that avoids the drawbacks of previous techniques and offers additional possibilities - take a look at the movie below detailing a 8 gigapixel images projected onto a virtual globe and updated every second:
The paper 'Dynamic Virtual Textures' (PDF link) is published in the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision '2009 (WSCG 2009) in co-operation with EUROGRAPHICS.
Unmanned aircraft, primarily helicopters capable of High Quality Digital Photography and HD Video are a low cost method to carry out rapid aerial surveys. Using remote control devices it is possible to fly through narrow areas such as city streets or natural obstructions at low or high altitudes. We are looking into this as at the moment due to our work on motion tracking in After Effects to label features in the urban realm (more details in a future post)
The clip below details New York captured using one of the drones:
Take a look at http://www.skycamusa.com/ for full details, over the coming years unmanned drones are going to become a major part of monitoring, planning and surveying the city as costs are coming down to a pro-consumer level. As we mentioned in a previous post, the copyright issues associated with using other peoples data is often a nightmare, as such it is sometimes preferable to map/survey an area yourself.
This is where the Microdrone comes in handy - an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a digital camera and a GPS it provides an easy route for gathering data.
Of note in the specifications is the units ability to gather stereo data, allowing essentially a 3D model to be constructed from the flightpath. This combined with oblique imagery from the same flight opens up the prospect of texture mapped models of small areas.
The movie below shows the Microdrone in action:
The clip is slightly creepy to be honest with the unit peering into windows and spying on women on beach towels - the Microdrone also resembles the surveillance units in Half Life 2 featured in our movie below on the Architecture of City 17:
Bringing it back to geography and urban models, the movies would also be of use for camera matching allowing a local context for 3D models. In short we want one - sadly we cant afford a unit with prices coming in at 25,000 Euro.
You can buy one and find out more details from OrbitGIS.
Planetizen has just published its annual list of the 10 best planning, design, and development websites. Representing some of the top online resources for those interested in planning, design, and development we are humbled to find ourselves included.
Planetizen kindly state that:
Digital Urban offers an in-depth and advanced examination of the technologies and advancements in the field of city visualization. Focusing on digital media as an avenue for documenting city change and development, Digital Urban is keeping the pulse of a rapidly advancing segment of the study of cities. Written by Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, this blog is the most up-to-date look at the process of mapping, visualizing, and engaging with physical spaces in the digital world.'
We know its a slightly 'pat on the back' type of post but hey we don't do this kind of thing very often and sometimes its such lists that make the time put into the blog worth while.
Right back to work, at the moment we are looking into crowd based modeling for populating the streets and simulating movement in 3D, as soon as we have something it will be in a post.
In the movie below CBS3 reports on Virtual Philadelphia, the first 3D virtual city to offer high resolution at street level. A specialised vehicle was used to capture fine details, such as store fronts and street signs. Users can freely walk down (or fly through) an exact replica of every street in Center City Philadelphia.
Created by GeoSim the geodetic foundation for the city models is based on 3D-polylines derived from 1:6000 scale aerial photography stereo-pairs.
The high-precision photogrammetry measurements (10-15cm) are used to generate accurate, GIS-standard compliant 3D-models that can be used in a variety of engineering and scientific applications. The model is based on gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements of Philadelphia to build an accurate city model. The end result is a model capable of providing a simulation of the physical streets, buildings and urban landscape with the "look and feel" of a real city.
Below is a quick image we are working on for a book cover - its draft and the main version will not have the star like background. We would not normally put up draft images but hey:
It was made using our Greeble Tutorial modified to simply use the technique on a sphere.
Augmented Reality is one of those technologies that is very impressive yet simple to implement. Thanks to the Development Lab of Inglobe Technologies its just got easiy via their Web-Based Tool that allows users to visualize Google Earth 3D models using Augmented Reality.
Take a look at the movie below:
While ARSights is not Augmented Reality directly inside of Google Earth, it acts a browser for models that in turn can be visualized directly on users’ desktop, by connecting a simple webcam and by printing a suitable code.
The panorama above was taken on Hampstead Heath in London near "Boudicca's Mound", click and drag to look around the scene after selecting 'load'. Boudicca's Mound is a tumulus where, according to local legend, Queen Boudicea was buried after she and 10,000 other Iceni soldiers were defeated at Battle Bridge.
The aim of the panorama was to capture the use of the 30 foot panoramic pole by way of a tutorial for the blog. Of course things don't always work out, the lighting was poor, making for a dull panorama and the filming of the capture process is facing the sun.
That said, we have included it anyway just so those interested can see how the camera goes up etc. We will have a more detailed look at capturing pole panoramas next week:
Note the 'digital urban' bag, its been going strong now for almost a year - if you would like one yourself (and who wouldn't) we have them 'at cost' via Cafe Press.
Above is a 360 x 180 degree panorama of Twin Peaks in San Francisco complete with an embedded video hanging between the two aerial masts. Click 'Load' the video with sound will appear shortly after the panorama, you can then click and drag in the normal way to pan around scene, zoom in and out using the either the mouse wheel or the Ctrl/Shift keys.
We recommend clicking 'Open' to view fullscreen to fully experience the video/panorama mix.
For those who just want a quick look at how it works we have included a video preview below:
Suburbia is a surreal experience when your usually based in the city 24/7. The panorama below highlights the quiet estates which are typical of 80's newbuild in the United Kingdom.
Click 'Load' in the above image and click and drag your mouse to look around 360 x 180 degrees, once loaded you can click 'Open' to view full screen.
The image was captured using a 30 foot pole, we should have more on the technique on the blog later next week....
'Top Tens' are always subjective but when it comes to the best skylines of the world, Hong Kong is normally listed as number one. We have to agree, the skyline is stunning and as a city is it one of all time favorite destinations, purely for the cityscape. The movie above counts down the top ten according to Fredgar125, we are not sure we agree about the placing of number 2 and 3 though - we would swap them over.
In our first ever poll - do you agree that Hong Kong is the best skyline in the world?
Note - sorry for the typo 'shoudl' annoyingly Polls cannot be changed once set running. The author has been suitably reprimanded..
INSILICO is a 'cyberpunk' city constructed prim by prim in Second Life. In general the cityscape of Second Life has yet to grab us with only smaller architectural projects such as those focused on by The Arch being of note. However, the movie below providing a 9 minute flythrough of the INSILICO build within Second Life, thankfully free of dancing avatars and such like, is certainly impressive:
We really like this one - the movie combines HDR, timelapse sequences and 3DMax/VRay in one unique architectural animation. The use of timelapse imagery lends itself perfectly to architectural visualisation and the author MILapse of http://www.hdrtimelapse.com/ is one of the techniques leading lights.
The timelapse above was captured from our roof overlooking the London skyline from Camden Town. Produced from 21,000 photographs it captures the heaviest snow in London for 18 years.
Note how the camera lens gets covered in snow from time to time.
TimeLapse is an iPhone app that automates the operation of the iPhone's camera to help create time lapse photo sequences. TimeLapse stores the photos in the iPhone photo library so you can easily download them to your computer and create a movie using applications such as Apple QuickTime Pro, Windows Movie Maker or ffmpeg.
The interface is easy and intuitive to use, simple click on the Timelapse application and set the number of pictures you want to capture, image size, number of seconds to start after tapping and the delay between images.
We use 10 seconds delay and set the number of images to capture in the 1000's leaving us to stop the process whenever we wish, although you do have the option to stop at a set time and date. It is then simply a case of setting your iPhone in place, clicking 'Frame and Capture' and then leaving it running - our first sample can be seen below:
The iPhone is obviously not waterproof so to capture cloud/cityscape timelapses it is advisable to mount the iPhone as close to the window as possible, while avoiding reflections. To do this we use the Belkinacrylic case which has a handy hole on the back enabling the iPhone to hook onto a window suction cup:
If you are planning to capture more than 1000 images it is worth noting that at the moment the iPhone names images in sequence up to 1000 and the goes back to the start. With a timelapse you end up with a file sequence of 1000_1 1000_2 etc meaning that the files need to be renamed.
Luckily the process is relativelystraight forward using ReName4U by Kelly Software. Running in Windows ReName4U allows you to list files by date captured and rename in numerical sequence, thus creating a file structure that can be ordered for a timelapse.
To rename your images simply point ReName4U to your image folder and select 'list by ascending order' - top right in the image below:
Once your files are listed, select the 'numbers' tab and chose the option to apply numbers in ascending order - then click start.
Your files are now ready to import into any number of packages to create the final movie. We use QuickTime Pro which has the option to 'Open Image Sequence', running at 25 frames per second you can produce examples similar to the next movie (it was snowing....):
By simply turning your phone on and running the software you can get some interesting sequences - its the easiest way we have found so far for creating timelapses. Hopefully the image naming issue can be ironed out, until then its not too much a hurdle and for £1.79 it makes TimeLapse a must buy for any iPhone owning image sequence fan.
The latest update to Google Earth - Version 5.0 - includes the ability to view historical data according to location. In short it allows you to zoom into and area and view aerial imagery from the past. The short clip below details growth in a suburb of Las Vegas:
While the majority of the imagery is currently US based, with some areas back as far as 1950, London can be viewed from 1999 onwards and other parts of the UK from 2001. It does make some interesting comparisons and could prove invaluable for the teaching of urban growth and urban sprawl.
The two images below are a quick example we found of new road and housing construction:
2005
2008Change is obviously not limited to urban areas, it can also be of specific use in explaining changes to our physical geographic environment. The movie below by the United Nations Environmental Programme, highlights the Aral Sea in Central Asia, where irrigation and water diversion has led to a dramatic shrinking of the lake beginning in the 1960s and continuing today.
This is an extremely valuable update to Google Earth and one that will have notable impact in the communication and teaching of both physical and human geography.
However, in a discussion this morning over coffee we realised that perhaps the whole Neogeography term is misplaced and we should in fact be referring to Neogeomatics.
According to Wikipedia: Geomatics is the discipline of gathering, storing, processing, and delivery of geographic information, or spatially referenced information. Thus Neogeomatics is the emerging trend of crowd sourced data, data gathering and delivery via Web 2.0 tools.
Where does this leave Neogeography, we don't know but at the best of times its an emotive subject, we will be discussing it at our session at this years AAG for anyone interested...
