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Zebra Imaging is holding a contest, conveniently wrapping up just before the Esri Federal GIS event in Washington, D.C, that gives all of you Geospatial folks a chance to win your data frames in a 2-foot square holographic print.

Each entry will be reviewed by a panel of Zebra Imaging judges for the following:

• Creativity
• Design efficiency
• Technical complexity
• Usefulness of application

Zebra Imaging will select three winners from the following industries: Public Safety, Planning, and Defense.

Winners of the challenge will receive a 24″ x 24″ 3D holographic print of their data and an illumination stand. The winning concepts will be displayed at the Zebra Imaging Booth at the Esri International User Conference the week of July 23, 2012 in San Diego, CA.

via Zebra Imaging Announces 3D Geospatial Challenge – PR Newswire – sacbee.com.

Science contest, geospatial, gis, zebra imaging

ESRI is demonstrating an impressive little Silverlight powered widget that rendering terrain data in 3D with full interactivity.  They support 2D and 3D Views, with full manipulation controls.

The imagery, street and topography base maps are sourced directly from Esri’s ArcGIS Online portal for geospatial services, data, applications and communities.

Elevation data is sourced from SRTM, GTOPO30 and GEBCO bathymetry via a new service published yesterday. The service was developed as a custom Server Object Extension for ArcGIS Server.

You can play with the app yourself at this link.

via Applications Prototype Lab Blog : 3D Terrain Mapping in a Browser.

Science esri, geospatial, interactive, silverlight

Geo-data company Urban Mapping has just announced their first reference application ‘Geo Fact Finder‘, an interesting mashup with Bing Maps to overlay lots of different social and demographic indicators.

The below screen shot shows off recent unemployment rates, shown in a thematic map at five percent intervals. Overlay with (say) political affiliation, educational performance, demographics, consumer expenditures, doom & gloom (tornadoes, hurricanes, coastal vulnerability to sea level rise), public transit, vacancy rate and much, much more…

via Geo Fact Finder: Infoviz, web mapping, on demand > Urban Mapping Blog – Urban Mapping.

Science geospatial, urban mapping

Last month, I attended the annual meeting of the ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) in Houston, Texas. This is the conference where oil and gas companies’ GIS professionals learn the latest applications of ArcGIS and geospatial technology to the exploration and production workflow.

It was my first time at ESRI PUG, having worked as a geologist and geophysical interpreter, i.e. the end customer, until 2009. Viewing the world of petroleum data management and analysis from the technology vendor/contractor side is a fresh, challenging flip on the same question all of us in the geo-industry ask: How can we push the limits of data access, analysis, visualization and scientific understanding using tech solutions, in this case GIS? This requires technological innovation, but, most crucially, a strong focus on the customer’s problem and closing the interpretation-GIS gap.  This last theme came up over and over again, even if not explicitly stated always, during the three days of the conference.

I’ll put the concept in context as I run down key conference proceedings.

PLENARY

1. Keynote Address given by ESRI’s Clint Brown, Product Director, and Damian Spangrud, ArcGIS Platform Manager. After a few obligatory minutes on the hydrocarbon exploration and production (expro) lifecycle, Brown and Spangrud tag-teamed an hour-long talk and demo of the ArcGIS Explorer operational dashboard. Two items of note: a) Bing Maps as part of basemap library, which means viewing well location in birds’ eye view along with well and company-specific lease information, and b) ESRI in the cloud (I hate that word “cloud” – all we need is more marketing-speak) – more specifically ArcGIS Server on Amazon to use geoprocessing tools directly, presented by Lawrie Sims, ERDAS founder and ESRI’s current director of imagery enterprise solutions.Tom Bell, Shell’s head of GIS services, talked briefly about CAD integration into ArcGIS (more on this later).

Read more…

Science 3d, conference, energy, esri, feature, geospatial, petroleum

A Google Earth KML overlay is available which contains GeoEye-1 satellite imagery captured on January 13th, the day after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit and caused severe destruction to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti and surrounding areas.  The New York Times has created a very useful interactive map from this data, allowing the user to move a slider between before and after images of the capital city.  Jonathon Crowe of The Map Room blog says that he has “never seen such innovative uses of a slider control outside [the New York Times's] online maps.”  The Map Room is also a great place to get geospatial updates on this awful earthquake, apart from the interesting, unique maps showcased there almost daily.

This is a technology blog and we live in tough economic times, but I encourage our readers to donate what they can to Haiti.  To maximize your money’s benefit to people on the ground, please check your chosen charity’s  financial health using Charity Navigator before you give.  Vive Haiti.

Science geospatial, google earth, haiti, maps

Geoeye has published high-resolution imagery of Haiti, after the recent earthquake disaster, on their website available for download.

This half-meter resolution satellite image shows Port-au-Prince, Haiti after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the area on Jan. 12, 2010. The image clearly shows extensive damage, roads covered with debris from collapsed structures, and people crowded in the streets and public places such as sports fields and stadiums. The white-colored National Palace shows damage along the roof line. The image was taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite from 423 miles in space at 10:27 a.m. EST on Jan. 13, 2010 as it moved from north to south over the Caribbean at a speed of four miles per second. (click to download)

The resulting image is full-color, 3000×3000.  There’s enough resolution to see the devastation, but not to see individual people.

via GeoEye › Gallery.

Science geospatial, haiti

A new web-based geospatial data visualization platform is coming online, currently in beta, from Digital Map Products called SpatialStream.

SpatialStream™, from Digital Map Products, is a SaaS Geospatial platform that offers a new and better means to develop robust spatial applications on top of common mapping platforms. SpatialStream™ was designed to offer access to sophisticated, yet easy-to-use spatial technology and spatial data sets to facilitate the rapid development of embedded GIS and consumer mapping applications.

From the few images and videos on the website, it looks like a more polished version of Google’s Fusion Tables.  Hopefully, they’ll have more luck overcoming some of the obscure limitations Google imposed.

via SpatialStream™ by Digital Map Products.

Science digital map products, geospatial, spatialstream, Website

It’s that time of year again when we peruse the Best Of Technology lists and see what rated.  This one stayed with me: CNN’s Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009.  (Go read it and return; I’ll wait.)  While one of the better tech pieces I’ve read this month, mostly because it mentions a lot of the tools that impacted us in 2009, it doesn’t delve into what truly makes or breaks that technology beyond the surface of the device itself.  This bothers me given CNN’s huge readership and the things people take for granted.

Technology is not just gadgetry.  It is also content.  A smartphone is great hardware but what you see in there – email, mobile websites, maps, books, videos, games and numerous apps – works with the smartphone to make the gadget useful.  Without this content, and millions of folks who work everyday to keep it accurate and accessible, your phone is a nice paperweight.  An eReader with access control placed on content will one day make an expensive brick.  In other words, what’s in the package, who put it there, how correct it is and how quickly and easily you can get it are as important, if not more, as the beauty and speed of the package itself.  Pay attention to it and ask for it all.

Hello! Maps!

One of the most important  aspects of smartphonery and search is geography.  That integration of positioning technologies allows you to hold your phone up to a cellphone signal and a Google or Bing map shows you where you are.  That advances in real-time 3D graphics give you 3D map navigation on any browser.  Moreover, how many social applications – from Foursquare to Yelp and Flickr to Twitter – have you used that aren’t location-based?

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware, Science bing, feature, geospatial, google, maps, neutrality, open data, privacy, realtime technologies, smartphones

New York, NY test of MapQuest 360 View. While some images lack clarity, the orange proximity bubbles are useful.

From the MapQuest blog:

360° View provides fantastic panoramic views (360° horizontally and 160° vertically) of any given image within the 360 View coverage area (initially 30 cities and 15 suburbs across the United States with more to come) … Best of all, MapQuest 360 View “just works” without requiring any non-standard 3rd party player downloads.

All Points Blog notes that the source of the imagery is Immersive Media, makers of the Dodeca2360 we’ve discussed before.  Microsoft’s new Bing Maps is pretty impressive with its accuracy and bird’s eye view all over the US, but as James Fee points out, 360° View does not require special installs like Silverlight to work:

Take that Bing Maps and your 3rd party player download.  MapQuest works without any Silverlight player to get in your way… except of course it uses a 3rd party player called Flash.  I suppose this plays into Adobe’s assertion that their 3rd party player download is included by default in many browsers by default.

With Google Maps tripping down the quality scale, while adding 3D cities functionality and increasing the quality of its StreetView, this seems like the logical next step for MapQuest.

Graphics city, geospatial, immersive media, mapquest, maps

I’m sure most people don’t think of Alabama being the pinnacle of geospatial research and imaging, but Google Enterprise is developing a GIS system for a “Virtual Alabama” and ESRI is building the “Virginia Interoperability Picture for Emergency Response”.  GCN’s Wyatt Kash sits down with Jack Dangermond of ESRI to discuss advances in GIS.

Virtual Alabama copies data from different state and local agencies into a central server for visualization in the Google environment. In contrast, the VIPER system uses a distributed Web service architecture that dynamically integrates a network of real-time authoritative source services. Distributed servers integrate various maps as mashup applications, not just visualization. While some of these services are simply mapping and visualization, many others integrate analytic services and support sophisticated applications.

via The next step for agency GIS: shared services — Government Computer News.

Science esri, geospatial, gis, google