Click on the picture for a larger view.
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
If anyone speaks Hungarian, perhaps they could translate the name of the site III. katonai felmeres for me. Fortunately, English text on the website explains what you find there: maps from the the 3rd Military Mapping Survey of the Austro-Hungarian empire, covering much of Eastern and Central Europe. The range covered goes from Istanbul in the southeast to Cologne in the northwest:
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.
Geofabrik makes available Open Street Map (OSM) data available for download in both the original OSM format and also in shapefile format. For the latter, a short set of features is available in layers: “road and railway network, forests, water areas, some points of interest”. While the primary coverage area is Europe, there are some datafiles for Asia as well. The data files are updated daily on the server to reflect the most recent changes in the OSM dataset.
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.
