I’ve been waiting for some property boundary issues to resolve in SL, and it’s sort of pitiful to see how long that can take. It’s with ever more regret that I find myself on the Mainland. But that hasn’t kept lots of real-world interesting stuff from taking shape.
The following video is not new. In fact it’s about a year old, but somehow I hadn’t seen it until tonight and I found it somewhat encouraging. Thanks for O’Reilly and Where 2.0 for bringing these two on stage together!
And the following pean to Google Earth did inspire me, personally. Hey, I was reading road maps at 5, covered my wall completely with National Geographic maps at 10, learned to navigate with nautical charts at 12, read aeronautical charts and completed an urban planning project at 14. Sometimes, it’s fun in rare moments when it’s dark overcast and I’m in an exotic place for the first time and I don’t know the way north; more often, I’ll savor the feeling of knowing which way is north while dreaming.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, the global set of county terrain is being compiled into an ESRI Terrain Dataset. This will include over 360 million masspoints, merging both interpolated 2-foot interval contour vertices together with FEMA LiDAR mass points, plus break lines and waterlines from photogrammetry. The goal is to use the ESRI Terrain data as a format to stage everything together to produce 30cm grid interval DEM in the urban areas. With luck, we’ll have that ready about the time that the latest photo mosaic finally gets loaded into ArcSDE successfully. Maybe grids from the Terrain can help create very detailed 3D county models. Hey Wei – we still have inverted terrain in Google Earth at the quarry on San Pedro Point! ;^)
As my patience with Second Life wanes, and I wait for more architectural input for my next SL build project, I have a dark OpenSim server with no fixed IP. I’m having stability issues with the Linux SL client, but have upgraded the workstation to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Google Earth client there is more stable, the NVidia drivers install themselves (sans Envy), and everything Ubuntu-wise seems to be getting incrementally better by the quarter.
I’m grinding some large images that have taught me that one very special difference between Windows XP variants and Windows Server 2003 is the latter’s ability to open files on the high side of 80 GB. I’d never quite realized it before but the moderately massive mosaics that I have created in years past (edging toward 250 GB single files) actually depended on Server 2003 to get created. Once the destination file exists, then XP can take it from there, and in all cases Windows Explorer can copy the monster files. But in that tenuous moment when a mosaic first grabs its space on disk for a huge output—one can’t seem to do that with XP.
So while I’m enjoying Google Earth on Ubuntu, there is something cool that I go back to Windows for, and that’s the new Google Earth browser plug-in. Since I’m gaining a bit of facility with the keyboard shortcuts in the full-stop Earth client, these all carry over to the plugin. My first test page has been stood up here and I’ve been deep into four continents with it so far. I understand that the plugin is only available for Windows and Mac systems at this time. If you can, Enjoy!
Also, as I get even faster with my keyboard navigation of G-Earth, I’ve actually seen some artifacts that are quite familiar from OpenSim. While zipping about between the Gulf of Yakutat and Canada’s Mount Logan, at certain viewing elevations I can accelerate the point of view forward quite fast. Doing so in this very mountainous terrain, I saw blocks of terrain standing up along what look like sim edges, resolving in a few seconds as more (sculpty?) bumpmap arrives. This is the same sort of artifact I’ve seen with terrain sculpties and sometimes, with region crossings in OpenSim. Also, I’ve found a couple of wild terrain grid errors in G-Earth. In one, a quarry dug hundreds of feet below sea level, right next to the sea, is displayed as positive elevation (absolute-value terrain, anyone?). In another, a boundary between US and Canadian terrain has a glacier flowing uphill onto a plateau. Go figure. Blame Canada! ;^)