Eight days without a post! We offer our apologies for the information black hole which was due to a) time and b) a lack of Internet connection in Hong Kong.

All is not lost however we have a series of posts ready to be written with news on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, XBox 360 and Virtual Earth, Crysis – Importing Architecture, Web 2.0 and the Long Tail, MS Points linking into Web 2.0, Valve’s City 17 and finally Automatic Architecture.

We also have a longer post with thoughts and comments from Mike Goodchild on Web 2.0 – its been a good week at the International Conference on Virtual Geographic Environments at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Sadly the promised HDR tutorial failed to materialise due to skyline being shrouded in mist for most our visit. The tutorial will appear, probably soon after London has its next sunny day.

Full blog posts resume tomorrow….

We are just about to head off to the International Conference on Virtual Geographic Environments at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Whilst chairing a session and presenting a paper we will also be writing a tutorial on High Dynamic Range imaging for the forthcoming book and taking a number of HDR panoramas. The tutorial should appear online either during the week or shortly after.

The conference introduction states that:

Geovisualization involves theories, methods, software, and applications for visualizing geographic phenomena in real or virtual worlds. This two day conference aims to address progress and developments in research and applications in this field, bringing together the world’s key experts to present the state of the art and discuss future developments. The technologies to be discussed will cover new ways of visualizing geographic phenomena as information spaces, as virtual and augmented and multi-media realities (VR and AR), as well as new ways of communicating such visualizations and representations in digital environments.

If your going then we look forward to seeing you there and if your not then we will cover the proceedings and technologies demoed right here on the blog.

You can view the full conference program from here.

Geosquan sent us a email last week for help from the readers of digital urban on his immersive ‘hotdog’ problem.

Geo describes an immersive hotdog as:

a georeferenced linear collection of immersive photographs which create a seamless immersive environment which can be entered in a Geospatial Exploration System such as Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, or NASA’s WorldWind. The shape of these immersive collections roughly resembles a hotdog.

Moving from a series of panoramic images to a seamlessly stitched scene is the ultimate aim, we recommend reading Geosquans full post on his blog and then having a think about it…

Its an interesting concept.