It’s not fully 3D immersive, but hey, 2-1/2D ain’t half bad. The “dsm40cm” model of Marin County has been published as the county’s default terrain on Google Earth. It’s a great pleasure to work with folks who are not troubled by a county representing its surface on a 40cm single-precision float grid that weighs in at 77 GB. In terms of data bulk, that is about the same as the entire 30-meter version of the US National Elevation Dataset.
What one gets when piling that much detail into a single county of around 520 square miles of land area is every building pad, driveway, and crown of road paving that were resolved. The dsm40cm model was developed as an ESRI Terrain Dataset that incorporated our best topographic contours (1:4800 scale 10-foot; 1:2400 scale 2-foot,) photogrammetric break and water lines, FEMA LiDAR and NCALM LiDAR data sets. All told, they currently comprise 40 GB of vector GIS data. Then, breaking the county up into 20 work areas to maintain ArcGIS in a stable and productive state, 40cm posting interval grids were generated that covered the entire county. When finished, these grid tiles were mosaicked with ERDAS Imagine into a single seamless grid. The WGS84 UTM, NAVD88-Geoid 2003 result was provided to the Google Earth team earlier this year.
As with all GIS data sets, it seems, the more detailed it is, the more rapidly it may need updating. In the works for the next year or so are several improvements to the dsm40cm model. First: the photogrammetric break lines will be segregated into steeper sets that tend to run along ridges, and shallower slopes that tend to delineate road cuts and building pads. The ridge set will be used as soft constraints to resolve some artifacts where they rise above some contours.
Second: incorporate new LiDAR data as it becomes available. Some data has already been provided for the lowest part of Lagunitas creek, and it appears that Prof. Ellen Hines of San Francisco State University’s Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies has been funded by USGS to gather LiDAR county-wide this year.
So there will be revisions, but an exciting aspect is to see data flows being brought into existence that support different levels of mirror world development.
Publishing the dsm40cm model in Google Earth is an important (and beautiful) threshold to cross. Making use of the dsm40cm model in county operations such as creek and watershed delineation will be the practical benefit that drives the work in the first place. And before too many more weeks, there may be entirely new approaches to publishing the data in an immersive environment (neither Second Life nor Opensim) to share.
Kent Woodlands building pad and driveway, in the shadow of Mt. Tam
Next week I plan to be on a panel at the Virtual Edge Summit 2010 in Santa Clara on Monday 22 Feb. Inspired by the style of a presentation by State of California GIO Mike Byrne at last month’s BAAMA.org educational session, I will try to prepare an Ignite-inspired talk for Virtual Edge. Since the virtual environment space almost demands it, I will use a film rather than a slide stack to structure my speaking.
The film is mostly cut, and a draft is uploaded in HD – for your perusal. If you want to hear my words try to keep pace with the film, consider attending Virtual Edge Summit, either in person or through one of its virtual channels. Hope to see you there!
If you have the bandwidth, please view the film in HD–I spent most of the past weekend cutting original FRAPS takes at full resolution so that the presentation could stand up to 1080p HD.
Many thanks to Singularity U, director Matt Rutherford, and to Randall Hand who brought it to my attention After chatting at SLCC 2009 this past summer, I appreciate the immediacy of this lecture. OpenSim is discussed around minute 37 (video is available at 720p HD, and is just over 51 minutes long.)
Discussion of augmented reality, and mirror world creation in Second Life and virtual world simulators, just after minute 44.
It’s hard for me to listen to the entire talk just one time and retain the best explanations – but clear and current they are. In a virtual environment, immersed in near-infinite possibilities, Rosedale may no longer be guiding the Second Life ship, but I believe he remains the compass needle
I don’t have much to say about these regions that hasn’t been written already, and my views have been less aesthetic than Shenlei’s.
But in the interest of boosting the bandwidth by which I can share OpenSim, I’ve invested in a much newer Adobe Premiere Elements than I’d been using for the past five or so years. It’s a gas to have it multi-thread while rendering, and I have direct-to-FLV write. Trying to share as much of the motion and fidelity via YouTube as I possibly can, I’ve crafted a video resolution that is a multiple of my Hippo / SL viewer screen. The FRAPS video direct to AVI (sorry, it’s Win XP) is 1600 x 1140 @ 10 fps. Yup, those are video frames. In the interest of surviving an upload, I’ve rendered them highly time-compressed, with output at 1515 x 1080 @ 15 fps. As of tonight there’s no sound, no intertitles, just the rushes. oops, if I read the YouTube Instructions for best formats, I should have trimmed the width to 1440, which is a multiple of 16.
Also, I have more direct upload options now with Premiere 8 than I had with my (recently demised) copy Premiere 1.0. Go Figure ;^)
While the Windows box grinds out the video print, I’m over here on Ubuntu blogging in a tab of 64-bit Chrome 4.0.249.43 and it is fine & fast.
For these videos, I visited ScienceSim Geography22_44 region and set the view to wide angle, then sat up at about 500 meters and watched the regions rez their terrain. For some folks, it will rank right up there with watching lead-based paint dry. For geography folks I’m hoping that these few minutes of sped-up video will convey, by dogged repetition, the primacy of regions in the provision of virtual environment simulators.
By the way, I’ve got a task: I need to find a better buzz word for the GIS community. I’ve been advised by some serious and well-intentioned (not to mention well-informed) folk that terms like “virtual” and “immersive” are actually boring to GIS’ers. So I’ll need to think about how to convey the concepts of “Mirror World”, “Multiuser Virtual Environment”, “Immersive Connected Experience”, “Third-Person Virtual World”, and related concepts into a catchy moniker. Hopefully, one that is not presently trademarked, either!
I’m trying to remain serious about this, but some of the options are treacherous. Geography in Social Media has a possibly awkward acronym; maybe it can be saved in recognizable form as “GIS for Social Media” or “Geography for Social Media”: GFSM
The term “3D Map with Me” is terse, slightly ambiguous
Here is the video chopped as it was when uploaded with 1515 x 1080 resolution. Problem with that is that by not preserving dimensions at a multiple of 16, and saving my viewer’s aspect ratio rather than the (standard since 16mm film) 4:3 aspect, my upload is clobbered into something perhaps suitable for a smartphone. So please consider this the Smartphone Version of last night’s rushes:
Then, once again with feeling, or at least with a little more rest, there is what I hope to be an HD-friendly moving vision of OpenSim, as it appears on the ScienceSim Geography regions. Yes! After it ripened on the YouTube servers for a few hours, I now see all the higher-res versions available. At 1440 x 1080, this is pretty close to what I see on my screen with a live Hippo viewer.
And after a day’s cogitation: anyone care to comment on the term: “Social Immersive Media GIS” as a moniker? Oops — I used “immersive” 8^(
The work on Point Reyes Station has more LiDAR data on tap, but this evening I’m taking a solar sauna in the Kepler planetarium. It’s a captivating display for both young and older eyes.
A large planetarium has our solar system displayed dynamically
Just time to post a couple of shots from Alaska North in ScienceSim.com grid. This build is being created with resources provided by the ScienceSim Land Grant Program, and should remain accessible until June 2010. Downtown area has been refined with 21cm LiDAR grid sculpty prims.
I haven’t figured out how to get the high-res shots with Hippo Viewer, so the 7 Mpel camera in the Linden Lab viewer is still my favorite. Hippo seems to top out at 2 Mpel right now.
Alaska North in Science Sim, featuring 1:4 Point Reyes Station
21cm LiDAR grid (2007) draped with 10cm orthoimagery (2004)
View across Lagunitas Creek toward community of Point Reyes Station
Good stuff has been happening – and GIS data has been finding its way into OpenSim!
Thanks to the persistence of Kim Smith and with help from John Jainschigg, I made my first-ever live audience presentation in the World2Worlds venue on 2009 12 15. Trying to fit everything into a regular work day, I was fortunate to get support to do the presentation from my desk at work rather than from home–and I indulged in a new digital-USB headset for the occasion. Oddly, the headset seemed invisible on the podium ;^)
Speaking at Smarter Technology, 2009 12 15 -- John Jainschigg built a custom podium several steps tall so that people could see my tiny avatar. Photo courtesy of Chimera Cosmos
After nearly a year away from pushing OpenSim (corresponding with my first year on a new RL job), I was a bit nervous about having up-to-date stuff to offer the audience. So instead of a slide stack, I presented the machinima of models that I had brought from OpenSim into Second Life.
Lazy of me, perhaps, but the video did help create a certain party atmosphere in the airy auditorium at W2W. It also helped echo my emphasis on a certain use of OpenSim that I’ve been striving towards since October 2007.
But as so often during RL conferences, the very best part of the presentation experience is the (sometimes serendipitous) human connections that take place around it, and this presentation was no exception to that rule.
One audience member was Richard Hackathorn, who described Second Life in the context of urban planning for listeners to Arina Hadich’s Urban Design Podcast. His enthusiasm for my subject matter at the Smarter Technology presentation has led to an upcoming podcast at UrbanDesignPodcast.com (details to follow). Although I haven’t been a regular listener to podcasts, when the subject of the talks are focused on an area of interest, I am impressed by how much information can be conveyed in the time it takes to listen. The podcast seems to have more detail per minute than I can get reading a browser on my phone, certainly more than I can browse while driving, (and far more detail than I seem to be able to convey in a minute spent writing a blog ;^)
Another audience member was Shenlei Winkler of Fashion Research Institute, who is surely among this world’s most prim-prolific individuals. I’ve been reading about the various Shengri La regions since 2008, created by Shenlei in collaboration with IBM researchers. Ironically, I was collaborating with different IBM researchers about the same time, in 2008 03. These days, Shenlei appears very active with several types of support for the IEEE/ACM-hosted, OpenSim-derived grid known as ScienceSim.com. Shenlei very kindly took time to contact me after the Smarter Technology presentation, introduce me (with voice chat) to ScienceSim and its resident researchers, and encourage me to participate in the Science Sim Land Grant program. More details are described in paragraphs below.
Through ScienceSim, I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Mic Bowman of Intel Labs, the group managing ScienceSm servers. The way that these folks have configured the servers is glorious. I’ve been a fan of running OpenSim on 64-bit Ubuntu with Mono since 2008 07, and the Intel crew have taken it to such another level that I find it astounding. In ScienceSim, it appears that the ODE physics engine runs for as little CPU cost as that which I’d experienced before with the near-trivial basicphysics. It is a rare treat for me to speak with configurators of OpenSim, much less those who strengthen and extend the simulator code!
Since I was firing up the forges to create some LiDAR sculpties for my ScienceSim project, I decided to warm up the works by creating some carefully-scaled terrain for ScienceSim’s Yellowstone 16-region model. Using public terrain data from the US Geological Survey, I processed terrain down to a model that was 1:83 in the x and y dimensions, and 1:55 in the z dimension (vertical scales are often exaggerated in both hominid avatars and terrain to make them more attractive). As a by-product of the production process, I also saved an intermediate bit of data that I had scaled to 1/10.38 in x and y and 1/6.9 in z. Knowing that it would present a worthy challenge to OpenSim server jocks, (the 1:83 model fit into 16 regions, but the 1:10 model would require exactly 1024 regions) I passed it to Mic along with the 1:83 terrain.
My jaw was somewhat slackened when, less than a week later I heard from Mic that much had been done with the
1:10 terrain. The Intel crew had actually had the tenacity to wait while all 1024 regions were brought up on a single processor; shortly afterward they prudently fit the regions onto a single blade, dual quad-core (Xeons?) system with 11 GB of memory and my favorite X86_64 Ubuntu/Mono environment. As if that wasn’t enough, they did this while configured with ODE physics! I’d say their effort was Olympian, but heck, it actually took them less than six days!
It’s been tremendous fun this month watching OpenSim make bold moves in the direction needed to support the sort of civic paraverse / Immersive Connected Experiences that could back-end many aspects of local agency operations. I’ve been looking for ways to get here since 2006 11, but with Intel’s demonstration of 1K regions on 1 dual-quad-core Xeon blade, I won’t look like such a fool scoping out costs for a county that would require 20K regions to build out at nominal 1:1 scale. (By contrast, in 2007 I had estimated that Linden Lab hosting of 575 regions would cost the City of Berkeley upwards of $60,000 per month!)
The Yellowstone work by Mic has been beautifully documented by Shenlei here, and here and here and here. I’m even using one of Shenlei’s Yellowstone sunset shots as my (Ubuntu) desktop background ;^)
This blog has been shamefully quiet, but Darb’s efforts have been continuing. Just a touch stealthier than before.
On ScienceSim.com, I found a pleasant roost from which to enjoy the solstice sunset.
Today, the third day of SLCC 2009, Philip Rosedale and Mark Kingdon provided the telephoto and wide-angle views of the road ahead for Second Life.
Union Square as seen from SLCC 2009
Philip summarized his message to a backdrop of an abandoned and decrepit Detrioit home thus (as best I heard it)
“TRY and recognize that we are at the very beginning, and together, you guys and us, will have to weather a tremendous changing as we move from where we are today
to where this thing is, this kinematic and imaginary global kind of new digital world.”
Mark had a fine intro where he disclosed a moment of discovering his passion for in-world activity while building
“…it was at that point that I got a second island, and the land addiction began.”
Sessions today included morning Art track’s “Plastic Reality”, running over the start of an enterprise session that I really wanted to hear all of: “Enterprise and Virtual Worlds: The Value Proposition” moderated by Dusan Writer. I stuck around for Schott Homan’s Purdue case study, caught a share of Patio Plasma’s “Building Interactive Science Exhibits, Tools and Techniques”
Lindens greeting the Woodbury College MC&D party bus
This morning I learned that Linden Lab has reached 320 employees. For the keynote, Philip Rosedale introduced a certain avatar named Kurzweil Tomorrow who held forth for an hour on this fine futuristic topic in a notably tenor tone.
Friday's Keynote presentation
Today I saw sessions involving reviews of pay rates for virtual-world workers (hint: not good). Enterprise SL usage with an emphasis on enhanced usability through rapid and effective training, and is supported by 24 Lindens who activley leverage existing technology.
At lunch and shortly afterword, I learned much more about the Meerkat Viewer. I saw some of the Machinima presentation and received a wonderful DVD of MaMachinima Festival 2009 thanks to Fab Outlander of Orange, and greatly enjoyed the informative panel about blogging SL moderated by Hamlin Au.
The evening offered a fine party bus thanks to Woodbury University School of Media, Culture, and Design that cycled between the convention and Linden Lab offices, where we left our marks. On our return, the Odd Ball was just starting and offered fine and fun conversations with trance and a truly cosmic parallel dance club in SL. The resident SIMGIS intern, Rat Dawg, snagged a copy of the brief novel AFK by Huckleberry Hax
Creative output from the Woodbury College party bus
In the midst of a sidewalk-coloring party
It was a wonderful day and tomorrow looks to be grand as well. For now, it’s rest!
