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.
I suppose I understand the reasoning in the approach, but I don’t understand why the concept of a ‘hotdog’ is relevent. In essence all he’s doing is alligning spheres along a determined path. If one simply draws a grid (think in context to space/time visualization), one is simply travelling a ball (eg: the capture-sphere) along a path. That path is recorded, and the only problem that remains is visualization — so that it visualizes seamlessly.
It doesn’t look like a very complicated problem, except that it’s the geo-viewer’s problem — meaning, that GE would have to allow for fading from one sphere to another in order to accomodate a seamless visualization as the viewer enters into that region. The rest would be deemed constants in process to acheive the final data-set.