Thus while Virtual London sits on a shelf due to data restrictions we have used Virtual Phuket as a prototype 3D Map system within Second Life.
The movie embedded below illustrates how sections of the model can be queried to view underlying data, loaded and scrolled by ‘rezzingprims‘ from our server.
We have been keeping an eye on Earthmine for a while as the use of stereo panoramas to extract 3D information presents a rapid way to both create and populate a 3D model in a way that is easily understandable.
They have just put out a press release that states:
earthmineinc., 3D street side mapping company today announced it has finalized an exclusive agreement with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to license 3D data generation software and algorithms created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and utilized on the Mars Exploration Rover Missions. earthmine recently unveiled its ground-breaking technology for collecting and delivering street-level three dimensional geospatial information for cities. The agreement with JPL and Caltech includes an exclusive and perpetual license for photogrammetric technology that allows for the creation of very dense and accurate 3D data from stereo panoramic imagery. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Caltech has taken an equity position in earthmine.
The movie embedded below illustrates the technologyto such an extent that we think their use of the photogrammetric technology may of cracked the issues of rapid street level modelling:
Earthmine has the potential to be one of the most exciting technologies of the year, we are eagerly looking forward to a demo version…
Our forthcoming reader contributed book ‘The Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces’ has spawned a companion entitled ‘The Worlds Best Urban Places and Spaces’ it comes courtesy of Russell Davies and Dan Hill.
To quote Russell on our notion of producing a blog reader contributed book:
I thought that was a really interesting idea, a great way to use a distributed publishing model. But, while chatting about it with Mr Dan Hill and, both of us being mindless optimists, we wondered if we could do a companion piece about The World’s Best Urban Places and Spaces. That seemed like a good idea too. Accentuate the positive and all that. So we checked with Dr Hudson-Smith, he’s cool with it, so here we go.
Two books to be honest is a great idea to celebrate the best and the worst of our cities and urban realms. While ours is the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces it should be noted that its a celebration of everything that can be just a little bit ‘crap’ about our cities with a note that things can be changed. So its on a positive vibe, just looking at the monumentous cock-ups people can sometimes make in urban planning, architecture and urban design.
Embedded below is a slide show of the images submitted so far:
If you would like to be in the book its simple, wherever you are in the world simply take a photograph of anything you think is a bad example of architecture, urban planning, streetscape or anything related to the city.
We will then include the text and image in a blog post as well as the book, full credit will of course be included on the blog and on your page/section of the book.
All we need is your images and then we can publish – as can Russell and Dan.
As an update to our previous post on the Second Life beta using the WindLight atmosphere rendering system we thought it would be worth posting a movie.
The difficult part of capturing movies in Second Life is the navigation, especially when concentrating on the water or the sky to display the new atmospheric system. As such it was well timed to be able to use the SpaceNavigator in Second Life under their debug mode.
The SpaceNavigator is traditionally aimed at Google Earth, SketchUp, 3D Max etc so it is refreshing to use it in conjunction with Second Life, in many ways it adds a new way to view the virtual world:
Note the water reflections and notable improvements to the lighting and sky renderings using the WindLight viewer.
