Darb Dabney's 3d GIS – OpenSim

Long has it been, but there’s still a bit of energy in the little guy Darb.
For visitors to the old Berkurodam site in Second Life’s Gualala region, a text link to the celebratory YouTube video now glows.

Thanks to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, their time-lapse photography at very high ISO that helps to share some of what their eyes may well see, and of course Michael Koenig for his care and smoothing of the HD video, with some loungy score, too.
Take five (minutes) and watch it on HD in a darkened room. You might find yourself pausing, reviewing, and spending 20 minutes enjoying.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

I was fascinated by an orange wiggle, that turned out to be the astoundingly well-lit India-Pakistan border, around 1000 km long.

Meanwhile, I’m forming some plans for next semester’s course, and have realized that it may well be possible to offer students training in multi-user virtual environments without hacking one of the lab workstations to image it as an Opensim server. Thanks to the incessant business analytics of Maria Korolov over the past few years, it was possible for me to quickly get caught up in the new and improved options for cloud hosting of Opensim regions.

Right away it became clear that the business model of Kitely was quite compatible with my modest but area-expansive needs for real-life terrain simulations.  I’ve found it quite easy to get set up with a single region, and that’s a really big start.  I was able to use the latest beta Second Life 3.2 viewer to connect to the latest Opensim 0.7.2 stable release, tweak terrain and set up a few flexi-prims to test the weather.  Nice work technically, and a very nice pricing scheme for my sort of use.  I’m also very sympathetic to Ilan Tochner’s philosophy of “just keep building new regions”—it’s a consistent theme with cloud solutions, and refreshing to see it in connection with Opensim.

I’m ashamed to see that posts have been blank since May. I have been busy on another site related to Cr-48 Chromebook usage—but that’s not about this stuff.

In the past months, I’ve been grinding on the Marin Community Map, in particular working out the details of how park lands interact with the tidal reaches. This as graded into a representation of tidal lands, a pulling back of water polygons to lower-low water, and the start of harmonization with the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Bay Area Aquatic Resource Inventory (BAARI).

I’ve spent hours dealing with topographic (elevation)-based definitions of shorelines such as were used in our model of San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (SF BCDC) jurisdiction. But as it turned out, all of our interesting marshes and tidal lands are tilted down toward the bay—go figure! So using guidelines for delineation that were very aptly documented by SFEI for BAARI, I started returning to the National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) 1-meter, 4-band imagery of tidal lands for photointerpretation. In many cases, the wetlands were more appropriately mapped using the NAIP imagery than they were using terrain-derived contours. Features like tidal channels creep up to higher elevations while maintaining their widths, while contours tend to pinch out at some point and start going back down the other side of the tidal channel.

One of the by-products of all this attention is that I’ve split out the tidal lands around Marin in that span between lower-low water—which will be cartographically filled in with a blue polygon and bathymetry contours—and high water, where the public easement for beaches stops. For consistency, I’ve detailed out every little patch of space between these tidal ranges, all around the county, and only left out places that were plainly in private ownership, like a back yard with a dock. In keeping with BAARI criteria, I’ve used NAIP color infrared imagery to detail out polygon areas for vascular life forms (marshes) and the tidal channels and outboard mud flats around them.

Particularly good views of lower-low water were captured in NAIP 2005 imagery. Fair views of medium tide were found in NAIP 2009 imagery. A nice mix of low tide and improved quality near-infrared band data are in the NAIP 2010 images. In the end, I’m using NAIP 2005 to trace the outer limits of mud flats at lower-low water, and using NAIP 2010 to detail out the extent of marshes, because excellent red contrast makes it easy in that year’s data.

Also, we’ve had significant progress / closure on the ArcHydro generation of flow lines countywide for Marin and associated watersheds. As of now, we have got flow models for drainage networks below 1-hectare catchment in all of Lagunitas creek, and below 1-acre catchments elsewhere. These flow lines have been attributed with catchment area every 10 meters along their length, which has allowed us to provisionally classify them for perennial, intermittent, ephemeral, tidal, or impoounded flow. Also, we have attributed USGS NHD FCode feature codes for every segment as either a flow-specific creek, various storm drain pipes and ditches, or artificial paths through standing water. All of this stuff is being run on our 45cm topographic-bathymetric surface model, so all of the ArcHydro flow lines are running seamlessly through the tidal reaches and out into deep water. It’s been particularly interesting to see where soft sediments meet granite and other outcrops offshore, as flow lines go from largely parallel sheets to dendritic patterns even when they are underwater, using this technique.

The modeled flow lines can be found at this link.

I’ve been catching up on this week’s Google I/O 2011 via some videos.  Much of my interest has been on how Chrome is presented, and the video does not disappoint.

The most fascinating insight, in terms of 3D GIS, and shared (not yet multi-user) virtual environments, appears to be Web GL.   For the benchmark of performance that leads to hours of time wasting entertainment, would you care to see Angry Birds?  I’ve only tested this with Chrome 12 on the Cr-48 and Chromium 13 on Ubuntu, but here’s the site

And what’s (much) more, a vision of seamless integration of 2D animation, video, and interactive immersive 3D environments at 25+ FPS — the project at ro.me

If you’re like me, and can’t view it in full WebGL glory because you’re on a Cr-48 or some other earlier browser, here’s the trailer to help give you motivation to try out something new in the browser world.

And what really caught my ear, and hasn’t been a top note in yesterday’s blogs was this announcement: the Chrome Book subscription pricing of $20/user/month for education institutions is also for government institutions.  If this should include the same centralized web-based management of user cadre—it would seem a very attractive price point.  Right now, a typical well-endowed elementary school might have a cart with 28 MacBooks that gets wheeled around between classrooms.    If 30 Chrome Books weigh in at $600/month, they’ll get replaced under the upgrade program before the cost approaches that of the initial MacBook acquisition, won’t they?    Government offices might stand to get 60%–80% of their users off of Windows desktops and onto something less costly.

The initial pricing of the retail Chrome Books at $500 seems a bit steep, although the Samsung unit will probably have an Atom processor with four threads and some better GPU capability.  It’s the subscription pricing that really seems to be the main kick—because it sounds far more attractive than the retail option.

Somehow, it just came in a flash – why not explore a 3D GIS domain hack?  So I did, thanks to the good folks in Iceland.
Most earlier domains still bring one to this blog, but the coolest IMHO is this:

http://blog.3dg.is

To help an interested community group,  I’ve today checked out how the draft Marin Community Map service can be draped over terrain with the free ArcGIS Explorer program (for Windows users, at least).

ArcGIS Online and Marin Community Map draped on world topography

Testing out the new workstation and its NVidia Quadro 4000 (2GB / 256 CUDA cores), it was a treat to visit ScienceSim again!

Visit to ScienceSim in Dakota South region

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.

It’s hard for me to listen to the entire talk and retain the best explanations – but clear and current they are.

(With apologies to Bill Ham and ZZ Top)

Some progress, and apparently some shifting ice floes underfoot.  Some blog posts say that the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2010 Express does not feature a “Spatial Results” tab for queries.  In fact, at least this week, it does.  It does seem like full-bore database development tools are withheld  by Microsoft until the Visual Studio Premium 2010 tier, and yet I’m  presently unable to locate  an IntelliSense add-in for the OGC-compliant methods on Geometry instances.

Here they are, 43 OGC methods on geometry instances,
plus 16 OGC static geometry methods,
along with the typical MS-style augmentation
11 augmented MS-extended methods on geometry,
and 4 augmented MS-extended static geometry methods.

Another interesting topic is how to merge certain feature classes for use by both ArcSDE and SQL Spatial.  In this regard, since ArcGIS Server 9.3 it appears that one can have ArcSDE store feature classes with SQL Server 2008 GEOMETRY data type.  Here’s an ESRI documentation page on the subject.

Sometimes, it’s the simple stuff that one stumbles over (at least I do).  Here’s some of the bootstrapping stuff for editing SQL in the Visual Studio 2010 environment.  Plus, although I’m personally comfortable with programming languages like structured C, and have been trained in (but not worked professionally with) Objective C++ and Visual C++ (at 6.0), I’m not finding immediate transparency with C#; most of the Visual Studio Web Developer  tutorial examples use Visual Basic.

1) How to Start the T-SQL Editor
2) The intro videos for C# development
3)