Google Earth | urbantick

Ovi Map 3D – the New Nokia Service

By: admin_urbantick

26-04-2011

Since the introduction of the Google Earth service in 2005 it has been the standart for online virtual 3D representation of the world geographically. The service has been hugely successful and millions of people have explored the world from the desk in their home. The service offers tremendous details via hi-resolution aerial imagery combined with layers of annotated point data. In addition the tool offers, via the KML language, the integration of individual and user generated information and data.

Several services have picked up on Googles success and offer now similar services. These are for example the Nasa World Wind, Microsoft Earth now Bing 3D maps, the UK focused yell.com 3D mapping service or the on Australia focused NearMap service. There were however also earlier virtual globes and mapping services, back then running offline. For example by Microsoft Encarta, 1997 or the 3D Word Atlas, 1998.

Google’s service still is the most popular. It runs on all platforms, which some of the others dont do and it works more or less intuitive. However there is the characteristic Google playful comic design to it which is, especially for the maps rather annoying. From fonts to placemarks the users always have to accept the content to be slightly ridiculous looking. Some of the other services clearly offer competitive features that are a lot better than the Google service can do. Yell has the amazing 3D modeling of the UK with great zooming, angle and rotation functions or NearMap offers the extremely great time slider function. Both functions Google products can do, but nowhere nearly as nice.

Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco down town in 3D. In the foreground the Transamerica Pyramid.

Now, Nokia is entering the market of digital globes and 3D mapping by taking the Nokia OVI Maps service 3D with OVI Maps 3D. And it is a great start, the service looks very pretty and the imagery is amazing.

On the Nokia blog it is described as: “Starting with a bird’s-eye view, you can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from the desktop, experiencing a virtual but super realistic perspective of new places.  The feature includes 20 cities today, but will expand over time. Cities in the Nordic region includes Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. When visiting Copenhagen or Oslo in Ovi Maps you can also use the new road-level imagery with a detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets that completes the experience.”

Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, showing street view bubbles in blue.

To use the 3D feature of te map the installation of a browser plug-in is required. With this the maps come to live and a combination of map, virtual earth and street view is accessible. The integration of the different elements currently work neatly in one direction. From the map view to the 3D view to the Street View. However going the other way can be frustrating, with the position and perspective being changed in the transition.

Nevertheless the detail and information is very good and of high quality. The best benefit is probably a different design approach using better symbols. For example the street view pops up in the 3D view as blue circles that change size as the user hovers over it with the mouse curser. Looks really neat. However, the integration of temporal aspects in both content and imagery is missing from the OVI maps and 3D. The 3D part is currently in beta and there might be quite some changes with the release of the final version.

Image taken from OVI Maps 3D / San Francisco street view at the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid, looking up.

The digital globe covers the terrain modelling across the entire world. However, currently the 3D rendering of buildings is only available for a selection of cities. This list of 20 cities will be extended continously, but so far they have not provided a schedule for this. Also the integration with the OVI API is not yet announced. Here again OVI offers great features the Google API does not. For example a geoShape that draws a circle with a given radius around a point.

Map by urbanTick for NCL / The current location of NCL twitter mappings of urban areas worldwide on the OVI map.

GeoGOOOOOO – Icons on maps

By: admin_urbantick

31-05-2010

Uncategorised

Icons dominate the modern maps completely and with the comic style Google simplifications of symbols our ives have become very ordinary. There are currently some 166 Google standard symbols available in Google Earth and 91 in Google Maps. Of course there are projects to symbolise our worlds, where you an find replacements and additional material for Google Earth and Maps.

Image taken from Google Earth / Set of icons preinstalled with the software.

This domination of everyday live orientation has lead to some surprising and funny projects and reactions. One was the real world Google Maps location marker and now one that I just found as an online project by the artist collective Jodi.
‘Jodi, or jodi.org, is the duo of the artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. They started creating artworks for the Web, later they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. Now, they have been in what has been called their “Screen Grab” period, making video works by recording the computer monitor’s output while working, playing video games, or coding.’
Their website globalmove.us is a portal to the wold of mapping with Google Maps and Google Earth, a spinning, twirling and hopping approach. If previously the icons made you feel ridiculous this is heaven. It is a very fascinating visualisation?animation using web based mapping tools , on the other hand it is quite annoying and without context that one could start making sense of what is going on on the screen. In the end it really shows how these tools manipulated our daily experience. I like it.

Image taken from globalmove.us / A animated drawing on Google Maps on random locations. Click the image for the animated version.

The work I like best really are the rotating circle locations on Google Earth this definitely makes you feel dizzy after a while!

Image taken from globalmove.us / A map connecting and circling round structures in Brussels on the map. click image for the animated version. Click HERE for additional cities.

Photograph the Earth from Every Angle and Every Altitude

By: admin_urbantick

01-04-2010

Uncategorised

The Google Earth Guys are back! You for sure remember their hilarious trip around the planet in their car to ‘Street View’ the roads of our world. The guys are created by Dan Meth and College Humor has brought us the great conversations Evan and Mike have while driving. Now they are back with a new journey for the two hard working, company dedicated employees. Of course the animation uses Google Earth imagery, off you go:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Space Flight and Clouds of Tweets

By: admin_urbantick

09-03-2010

Uncategorised

The recent Twitter data for one London Weekend has been re-rendered as a clip by DigitalUrban. Earlier version can be found HERE.
It is the same data with 60,000 geo referenced Tweets in London over a weekend from Friday evening to Monday morning. This visual is now also using the new navigation tool, the 3D Connextion ‘Space Navigator’, a pretty awesome tool for navigation in Google Earth for example.

CLip by DigitalUrban and Music – ‘Social Awkwardness‘ by Xanthe over on unsigned bands.

London Twitter Cloud

By: admin_urbantick

02-03-2010

Uncategorised

Together with the tweet-O-meter project run at CASA as part of the NeISS research project we have collected location tagged tweets around London (M25). As described in an earlier post on this HERE, the idea is to capture the urban narrative. The current data covers a whole weekend from Friday evening to Monday morning and the set holds some 380’000 individual tweets. However this brakes down to 60’000 truly geo referenced tweets, by 5’500 individual users. The thing is, that these are only the mobile tweets and they are captured only if the locations sharing is activated in the twitter profile. Still this makes an average of 10.6 tweets per mobile user over the weekend. Overall we have 39’222 individual users witch makes some 9.7 tweets. So the mobile users seem to message slightly more, but not significantly as one could maybe expect.
In terms of density per location as one could expect the focus is in the centre. There are local hotspots as the weekend progresses, such as Kings Cross and Old Street. But then there seems to be a accumulation of density along the transport lines into and out of the centre.
To visualise the temporality of the data tweets are in the below clip output as a message cloud rising and hovering above London. It is a simple time-space aquarium were the time is plotted as the hight information. The later in the weekend the tweet is sent the higher above the city it floats. As the density develops the low times can be clearly spotted, when it thins out the lines and London sleeps. The animation is rendered in Google Earth, with the KML file brought in through a VB script from Excel. Once set up this is quite a flexible combination. However, the KML file can get quite big, since there is a lot of information contained with all the messages.

Urban Narrative – Tracking Movement via Twitter

By: admin_urbantick

01-02-2010

Uncategorised

We have been logging Twitter activities in the London area (M25) over an earlier weekend in January with some code Steven Gray has put together. The idea was to log the location based traffic and see what the mapping of it would bring. There are a number of twitter mapping projects out there already, for example twittermap.tv from where the timeLapse of the weekend activity was captured HERE, or the first big mapping project twittervision.com. However, we wanted to focus on a local region, a city, to see what the traffic is and how the location might play a role. The traffic visualisation page tweeTOMeter is part of this interest.

Image by UrbanTick / Screenshot of Twitter data visualised in GeoTime’s space-time aquarium.

One could think of this investigation as following the urban story quite literally, while following the tweets of citizens. However it is quite tricky to make sense of it all. The dataset for the weekend, which covers Friday evening to Monday morning contains some 300’000 tweets. Not all of them are properly geo referenced. Only 1’700 have actual Lat/Long information in the geo tag field. Furthermore some 60’000 have Lat/Long details in their profile tag field and the ret only has a generic profile location, such as London. This probably is because of the relatively new geo support of the Twitter API. Most users still seem to have little interest to include their actual location, as well as a lot of the applications do not yet properly support the format. Interesting seems to be the network. Whom are tweets directed at? It seems to be quite a high average of direct tweets, almost 3 per message. Also who will actually read it, how many followers are there in average?
Working with the real geo referenced tweets, surprisingly they contain quite a bit of movement.
For a quick look at the data it has been visualised in GeoTime. The representation in the time-space aquarium makes the diagonal lines, that suggest movement, very distinguishable from the vertical stationary lines. While looking at the replay in the 2D view the weekend really comes to life and London gets busy.

Similar visualisation, with snippets and names, but without the river Thames, can be fund HERE.
GeoTime here really offers a powerful and very quick way of visualising the data in space and time and offers a whole pallet of different visualisation types, each including a set of tools for analysis and manipulation. Import comes either via ARCGIS or even quicker excel.
The main problem really is the quality of the graphics, the design of the result. Here the user has hardly any choice or possibilities to manipulate anything from colour palette to line style or font. This is a bit annoying especially because the tool is kind of an end of the line analysis tool, after you have prepared the data elsewhere.
The second quick one goes into Google Earth obviously. Here the data again comes from a simple excel spread sheet with a VB macro to write the KML file. This literally takes 5 seconds to do and you have a KML file, including time tags in Google Earth.
This one only plays the locations though, also in a time window of some six hours.

New City

By: admin_urbantick

17-11-2009

Uncategorised

To continue from the post on the origin of architecture, which I have to admit wrote in a haste, there is an interesting talk by Greg Lynn on his project ‘New City’. It continues the debate with a lot of critique on the contemporary state of the city, but especially critique on the way the city is thought of, not only if we take virtual representations as indicators of the general understanding of urban aspects.

Lynn_newCity.ri3DI0Ch972s.jpg
Image by imaginary forces – Screenshot taken from NewCity clip – the New City toroids.

Earlier this year Greg Lynn has given a talk that was broadcasted in the Seed Design talks series with the title ‘New City’. He was talking about a recent project he had on exhibition at the MoMa. It was the idea of developing a virtual world from an architectural point of view. His analysis of existing spatial and especially architectural representation in virtual worlds is quit interesting. I do not really have virtual world experience, like Second Life or something, but this is to some extend down to the visual representation. To me the graphics are simply ridiculous, why should I use this to represent my virtual self if I cannot identify myself with it? I can however identify with the graphical language used by Lynn. But then I think, this represents a very specific social grouping thorough factors like, culture, education, background, financial situation, location and so on. Whether you choose one over the other is not an as free decision as we might like to think of it as.
However this might be a side line of the debate, in terms of the evolution it is obvious that Lynn very cleverly positions his work in this context. His introduction makes good use of and plays well with the expectations of the audience. He knows exactly what this social group is looking for.

The most interesting aspect Lynn is talking about in this presentation to me is his critique on the spatial configuration. He says: “The world is not…ah..its not a globe. I mean I do think… I, I, do think Google Earth is fabulous, but the idea that you go on the internet to see what the world looks like and you find this kind of 15th Century globe sitting there, that you spin around on it on an axis, is … is very strange to me. (at 05.50 in the seeds clip”
So what the come up with is a series of rings called toroids, that are interlocked to replace the globe. it is an interesting idea and has a logic to it as he is talking about it. However there is definitely critique in terms of space, distance, separation and so on. However the visualisations are pretty sexy and this is probably what it needs to be.
However what I am really not convinced by is the actual representation of architecture. This has a long way to go. It looks at the moment like space box renderings. They are following a gravity model to structure activities, but the dealing with the actual form of something needs to be developed.
Especially in the context of the concepts of space and time as social conventions. The current model of space and time could be described as being based on the idea of a market place as the definition of a location and a time. However this would also needed to be radically rethought in this proposal, especially as Lynn introduces this new city as “a new sort of encyclopedia”. This would move the framework from the trade focus towards a focus of knowledge and this might generate a space time construction based on the library as the location and the past as the time.
However have a look at the talk it is only 20 something minutes so a good clip for the lunch brake.

Here is an interview with Greg Lynn where he discusses the propsal.

World Racer

By: admin_urbantick

28-10-2009

Uncategorised

Gaming in the real world is currently the big thing and interactive technologies do support these activities. However there is on the other side similar effort to make games more realistic, see game engines on digitalurban. In between the two extremes, you could say, there sits Google Maps and Google Earth. Of course not as an official game but in terms of reality vs. virtual, as it virtually represents the reality. Google has so far had little aspiration to take on the games market, apart from the flight simulator in Google Earth together with release 4. There are now with the release of the new flash version some new options. Not Google, but independent developers, have started to merge some gaming interaction with Google’s virtual real world platforms.
A very early one was the Monster Milk Truck that could be driven in Google Earth. I love that one, it is hilarious with some nice, but simple effects, like jumps that made the feeling. It was made possible by the release of the Plug-In to run Google Earth in a browser.
Earlier this year we saw the launch of Monopoly based on Google Maps and now there are some new racing games out.
One is RealWorldRacer by Tom Scott. Here you can enter a destination in Google Maps as you would to find a route you are planning and off you go. There are some four cars to compete with. Along the track there are check points and you have to drive relatively close to them to deactivate. This is to make sure you are not driving off somewhere on the map, as there are currently o other bounding elements implemented.
Another tool is googleDrive developed in conjunction with the MIT by Samuel Birch, this one is said to have limitations where you can only drive on the actual roads, however it did not work on my machine so let me know what you think of it.
A third one is Driving Simulator on geoquake and here you can choose between four different vehicles. It has just released a beta version with a perspective to drive the car HERE.

realWorldRacer.QDJ2tOb2cKUs.jpg
Image by urbanTick – Screenshot Real World Racer : Plymouth to Exeter. You can tell, I am driing the red paper car that is going down towards Sutton Harbour.

Underwater – Google Earth Beta 5.0

By: admin_urbantick

13-02-2009

Uncategorised

Google released this month a new 5.0 Beta version of Google Earth. The main new feature is the water. So far the oceans were just blue surfaced with little detail. In Google Earth 5.0 the oceans have become part of the (virtual) world and user can explore the “all new” underwater world.

This is a great feature and I imagine the beauty of the detail if someone starts implementing the rising water level. Not only on the level of climate change and catastrophes, but more on the level of the daily cycle of the tide. This was kind of the trigger for my research topic in the first place. The project of the floating city in the Thames Estuary, were the ever changing sea level was a research field and had a great impact on the project. To capture this rhythm in Google Earth would be great.

There is also a new time line, redesigned and a lot bigger. On the PowerBook screen it takes quite a lot of room that is annoying. But I’ll see how it improves the handling, as I will use it in the next few days. The new timeline makes also a series of older aerial photographs accessible. It is now possible to follow the change of a place over time using a series of older imagery.

Recording is now a feature of the free Google Earth version. So far only users who bought a license of the popular visualisation tool
had the option to record their trips on the (virtual) planet. Now everyone can record and share recorded trips including sound – live comments. The focus is on recorded TRIPS, it really is only a record of the navigation done within Google Earth and not a real movie. It is not possible to exchange these recordings other than as kml/kmz files and you need Google Earth to replay these files. You can exchange them though, but not as real movie clips like it is possible in the pied version of Google Earth.

One more new thing is the GPS direct import. Google has now discontinued the $20 version of Google Earth and implemented the GPS track importing function in the free version. It covers still the same functions as it did three years back, meaning only Garmin/Magelan and NMEA support.
I have not been able to get it to work though so far with my serial to USB connection to read directly from my Garmin Forerunner. I have been doing this back when I still had the paid version, but I remember it to be very difficult and each time a number of attempts to connect to the right port were needed. It would scan through all the available port one by one and the eventually hock to the right one. I am suspecting that Google decided not to support the serial connection any longer.

GoEa_gpsImport.NmxJs6HnHRq6.jpg
Image by urbanTick – Screen shot Google Earth GPS import window

London Diary – week one

By: admin_urbantick

13-02-2009

Uncategorised

A short clip to visualize different peoples movement over the period of one week in London. It is a first test with a number of participants using Garmin GPS devices.
The data returned is actually better than expected, although there is a lot of errors, even in the city centre there is often a signal.
For a better visualization the day and night feature of Google Earth was used to clearly mark the passage of time. It’s sweet how they all rest in their place when it is dark, and then start off early in the morning. The weekend has been used by a number of participants to make trips, sometimes quite far, in most cases to visit relatives or friends.

UDp_090212_GoEa from urbanTick on Vimeo.

Animation produced in Excel and with a converter by Bill Clark brought to Google Earth

Looking forward to get to work with the data from next week.

— urbantick

Ovi Map 3D – the New Nokia Service

GeoGOOOOOO – Icons on maps

Photograph the Earth from Every Angle and Every Altitude

Space Flight and Clouds of Tweets

London Twitter Cloud

Urban Narrative – Tracking Movement via Twitter

New City

World Racer

Underwater – Google Earth Beta 5.0

London Diary – week one

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