Digital Earth Blog

Hitta.se, a Swedish search and mapping site, has just released a 3D map of Stockholm that works in virtually any browser in any operating system.

The technology is powered in part by C3 Technologies, who explain their software as follows:

The technology is based on high-resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. For every picture, the camera’s position and angle are calculated with extremely high precision, using a very advanced navigation system. This is what enables us to give each pixel its geographical position with decimetre accuracy. Then, using stereovision technology, we combine two sequential pictures to measure the area’s height profile.

The result is an aerial photograph with each pixel positioned in three dimensions. Over an entire city, thousands of such photos are combined into one coherent 3D model – through an automated process in our unique 3D-processor.

Thanks to all this, there is no one today who can take pictures with the same precision and speed as we can. One example is when we filmed all of Stockholm in October 2007 and created a realistic, yet zoomable and turnable, 3D model of the city in just 3 days.

It seems to be a pretty cool technology, considering cities can be created so quickly and it works on such a wide variety of platforms.  The detail is far worse than what Google Earth and Virtual Earth have, though it renders trees and “any object larger than a VW bus”.

Ogle Earth has a post that gets into a bit more detail and is well worth reading.

As reported by the Google LatLong Blog, KML has now officially become an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard.

According to Google, there are tens of millions of KML documents available online, hosted on over 100,000 unique domain names.  The number of files isn’t a huge surprise, but 100,000 unique domains seem like a ton!

As part of this, Google has transferred ownership of the standard to the OGC.  To quote Google:

This transfer of ownership is a strong reflection of Google’s commitment to open standards. Fundamentally, our interest is not to control information, but rather to encourage its spread.

Microsoft started adding support for KML last October, so getting KML accepted as a standard is another step toward making it the ubiquitous mapping standard on the web.

The Google Chart API has just released a new version. Among the new features:

• No limit on the number of requests.
• Support for maps! USA state maps, other country maps, world maps, etc.

It’s quite slick. Click on the image on the right to see a chart of the states I’ve lived in (the lighter the color, the longer ago I lived there). The chart was built by simply crafting this URL.

There are some neat possibilities with this, especially since you don’t need to worry much about usage. More information can be found on the Mapperz blog or by reading the official Google Chart API documentation.

Mapperz has a post about the brand new Dominos Pizza Tracker, which allows people to track the status of their pizza within 40 seconds of accuracy.

In an effort to “take the mystery out of delivery times”, this will show you when the pizza is in the oven, in the box, in the car and at your house.

It looks like a neat system. It makes me want to order a pizza just to try it out, which might have been part of their plan…

I’ve had the opportunity to play with the Sandio 3D O2 mouse for a few days and I thought I’d share my impressions of it with you.  Before I saw the mouse, I was expecting something similar to the SpaceNavigator, but it’s not very similar at all.

To start with (and I think this is its best feature), this functions as a normal mouse, suitable for e-mail, browsing, gaming, etc.  The SpaceNavigator, of course, is a completely separate device.  This is a pretty big deal.  I don’t usually bring my SpaceNavigator with me when I travel (it’s certainly small enough to bring - I’m just lazy), but I always bring my mouse.  Having both in one device is great.

This mouse has the normal two buttons + a scroll wheel.  Above the scroll wheel is an analog joystick, similar to those found on game pads (Xbox, PS3, etc).  On the right and left side of the mouse are two more analog sticks, and a couple more buttons.  Those analog sticks are what you use to fly around in your 3D worlds.

This mouse is billed as a “gaming mouse” and I can’t really comment on that aspect of it.  My main use for it would be in Google Earth and Virtual Earth, so that’s what I tried.

Once inside of Google Earth, I have to say I was a bit disappointed.  Part of that can be attributed to the learning curve on any new device, but it was a slow process to learn.  I found the SpaceNavigator to be much more intuitive.   Beyond that, there were two problems that were much more serious:

• It doesn’t support simultaneous movements. For example, if I was panning across the map and wanted to dive, I had to choose one or the other.  I really don’t understand why I couldn’t pan and dive, but I tried repeatedly without success.  Compare this to the SpaceNavigator where you can make four individual movements at a time (pan while diving while rotating while lowering the view, etc).  For an example of that, check out this entry in the Google Earth Blog where Frank flies around Denver looking at the 3D buildings.
• The analog sticks on the device aren’t truly analog - they’re digital (as in 0/1).  They have an audible “click” when pointing in any direction.  You either go or you don’t — there is no in-between.  Again, compare this to the SpaceNavigator where you can vary the amount of pressure which then varies the speed of your movement.

I really wanted to like this mouse.  It looks awesome, with a big footprint, great colors and cool glowing lights on it.  However, I just can’t bring myself to like it that much.  It will probably become my travel mouse, with my generic Microsoft Mouse / SpaceNavigator keeping permanent residence on my desk.

If you’re a gamer and you’ve tried this mouse, please post in the comments and let us know what you thought of it.

France’s National Geographic Institute has just released a 3D version of Géoportail,  a 2D web-based map that was first released last year.

It looks to be a pretty good piece of software.  The two biggest drawbacks right now are that it’s Windows only and it has no 3D buildings.  However, both of those issues should be resolved soon.

Ogle Earth has a very complete write-up about the software, including some comparisons between it and other 3D earth software.

This is both amazingly cool and horribly frustrating.  The Institute for the Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has built a complete 3D model of the city of Rome as it was in 320 A.D.  “Rome Reborn”, as it’s called, is astoundingly sharp and consists of billions of data points.  FTA:

“To create the digital model, researchers scanned a 3,000 square foot, 1/250 plaster model of the city – the “Plastico di Roma Antica” – which was completed in the 1970s. Because of the model’s intricacy – the Plastico’s Coliseum is only 8 inches tall — Italian engineers used laser radar originally designed to measure precise tolerances on jet parts to scan within a tenth of a millimeter. Each 6-by-6 section contained 60 million data points.”

As of now it has only been licensed to a tour company in Rome, but they’re in talks with Second Life to bring it there.  We can only hope that it might find its way into Google Earth or one of the other digital globes one day as well.

Kumomo, a Malaysian company that owns a large factory, is offering up ad space that would be viewable in all of the various mapping systems (once the area gets updated again).  They’ll be using a company in California, RoofAds, to do the installation.

I imagine that we’ll be seeing quite a bit of this kind of thing as time goes on.  In this case, however, there are a few other issues to consider that were raised in an article by the Natural Search Blog:

1. This is apparently the factory in Google Maps - completely obscured by smoke/clouds.  If it’s a cloud, odds are pretty good that it won’t be there next time.  However, if it’s smoke from the factory then that would likely be there every time.

2. There is a good deal of child labor that occurs in Malaysia.  You’d want to make sure that this isn’t happening at the factory where your ad would be placed.

3. The ad space will go up in November.  Why then?  I can’t imagine they know when any new satellite photos will be taken.  I guess that’s just when they’ll put up the ad, and then it’ll show in GE, GM, VE, etc — eventually.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, as well as to see how many other companies try the same thing in future months.