Via the James Fee GIS Blog, the online mapping service Platial is shutting down. If you’ve been using it, you have a very limited amount of time to export it in KMZ format; access may shut down as early as March 2nd. Geocommons will be acquiring the data from the past five years, and making it open to the public soon. A drawback of keeping your data/maps in the cloud; though I didn’t use Platial, I’ll make sure in the future with similar services that there’s always an easy way to export and backup my data.
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According to the study, “Why Susie Sells Seashells By The Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions“:
“…no matter how we analyzed these data, we found that people whose first names begin with G, Ge, or Geo gravitated toward the geosciences.”
And they found that people named Dennis were more likely to become dentists.
There’s been a mini-craze online for creating tilt-shift photos, where the focus position and depth of field on a landscape/cityscape are manipulated to make the picture look like a miniature reproduction. For authentic tilt-shift photos, you need a special lens, but you can re-create the effect using Photoshop filters, or by following tutorials online. Now there’s an online website called TiltShiftmaker that lets you upload your own photos, and applies a tilt-shift effect to them:
Original photo from the island of Santorini (from Flickr):
Run through TiltShiftmaker:
The process works best on images that don’t have a few objects much taller than the rest of the scene, as that can result in the base of the object being at a different focus/blur than the top.
Taking the week off for travel and holiday time with the family; hope you all enjoy doing the same.
I posted a while back about Johnny Lee’s plans and software for converting a Wii Remote into a hand/motion tracker for various uses; seemed like a good match for some mapping applications. Touchless is another motion tracking system, this one using a webcam to track user-specified objects in the webcam view to modify objects on-screen.
Played with the software demo shown in the video above a bit (which includes manipulating a map image on-screen), and while it’s not perfect, it is kind of fun. It’s open source, and there’s an SDK available if you want to experiment with adding it to your own applications.
Check out this 5-minute TED presentation by Johnny Lee on using a Wii Remote with a Bluetooth-enabled PC, simple IR LED, and video projector to create a simple video whiteboard, hand/motion tracker or touchscreen system:
Seems like a good match for digital globes like Google Earth and WorldWind, or for some GIS display systems. There’s more information, including software and source code downloads, at Johnny Lee’s website, and more information is also available at the WiimoteProject forums.
MapChannels writes to announce a few new features:
Holiday Maps: Create an embeddable Google Maps window with the option for additional information layers:
- Panoramio photos
- Geo-tagged Wikipedia articles
- Google Street View
- Traffic Layer
- Weather Information
- User-defined KML or GeoRSS Layers
- Index sidebar
- Hotel search using the Map Channels Hotel Directory
- Google search
- Slide Show
- Google Earth 3D (note: currently buggy, doesn’t work for me in Firefox 3)
MapChannels For Virtual Earth: Create an embeddable Virtual Earth window with KML or GeoRSS feeds (an analogue to Google Maps’ MyMaps feature, also supported by MapChannels in embeddable format).
StreetCities: New tools to combine Google’s Street View with a second view in the Google Earth plugin. This doesn’t work in Firefox 3, either.
