Mapping as espionage is a concept that can’t be escaped even though technological advancements are slowly making this advantage obsolete. We are reminded of this as the Chinese refuse to be measured and monitored for their carbon emissions, showing a reluctance to be mapped based on security concerns. The strategic nature of mapping has become far less critical given the advance of geospatial technologies, yet there are still those left behind in pre-Internet thinking.

The fact is that we can and do measure the Earth from space. We have highly detailed and continuously updated maps of the entire planet in aggregate, and we’re on a path to add more and more sensors. If we continue on the rapidly expanding capacity of earth observation, it won’t be long before we have real-time data for the whole of the globe.

Refusing to be mapped and measured ignores the reality of current and coming earth observation, remote sensing, and mapping technologies. A Cold War mentality of life behind walls doesn’t exist anymore. It’s far more constructive to embrace the reality of transparency, and work to enhance the reliability and impartiality of measurement technology with a broad international science and technology team. A greatly enhanced Global Earth Observation System of Systems that is built on an open platform could greatly accelerate the realization of the Digital Earth vision, and China is at the forefront in advocating that vision.

The idea that it’s bad if you’re mapping me will certainly not go away. Clandestine operations are a political reality. However, coming together on whole earth mapping, modeling and monitoring goes way beyond the security of individual nations toward the security of our planet to sustain humankind.

While whole planet thinking is the aim and intent of Copenhagen, it’s a difficult concept given geopolitical perspectives. An awareness of technological capabilities, and the beneficial outcomes of a whole-Earth system of systems, could go a long way in reinforcing the realization that all countries need to come together for the stewardship of our planet.

A company called Absolute Hollywood has created a 20-meter globe-shaped movie screen in Copenhagen for the COP15 climate conference for nightly viewings of the planet as we are seen from space. The giant movie serves to illustrate our global impacts and to remind those that watch of our finite footprint. Images of the screen at night, nestled among buildings in the downtown core, provide a surreal juxtaposition of our planet and society. A live stream of the nightly viewing is available on this website.

Just a few years ago there was a flurry of activity to create virtual digital worlds such as Linden Labs’ Second Life for interaction in spaces some call the metaverse. At that point in time, the prediction was that these worlds would far surpass Facebook and MySpace as the places that we’d want to gather and interact. The thinking was that the almost real-life interpersonal connections in these virtual worlds would cause us to congregate. The flurry of early adoption hasn’t sustained, and if anything we’re far less virtual but more constantly connected today.

The virtual reality of a metaverse requires a great deal of programming, data creation and design in order to approximate reality and become a compelling experience. The time and resources needed for such an effort is a hard thing to justify without a clear understanding of rewards, but that barrier has yet to stop almost all other Internet fads. Perhaps it’s the complexity of the user experience to date, and the chaos of the commons that’s holding the idea back. The metaverse is not an ‘if’ scenario, it’s a ‘when’ scenario and it’s interesting to think about how it will come about.

Digital Earth Momentum

All of the metaverse activity has direct ties to the geospatial concept of a Digital Earth where we will model our world more closely, incorporating science in order to continue to expand our knowledge about Earth systems, and share insights along with interactions in virtual space. The interactive 3D environments that use avatars for interaction seem to be on the wane, but that sort of interface has always been part of the Digital Earth vision.

The concept of stepping into a digital reality to interact with data and others provides a means for collaborative knowledge building. Gathering to learn and share knowledge such as a in a digital classroom or online event goes beyond the social interactions to achieve the “collaboratory” vision.

This Digital Earth dream remains relevant today, but is a long way from being realized. Geographic information explorers such as Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise, and ArcGIS Explorer explore what’s possible to extend beyond a 2D map representation, but they’re far from the realism of the vision and they lack interactive elements .

More than 140 Characters

By far the most popular social media tool right now for online interaction is Twitter. While Twitter offers quick connections to like-minded individuals, and the ability to create community links, it’s far from the rich social interaction that’s envisioned in the metaverse. The limit to 140 characters creates terse back and forth exchanges with links to outside content, but no real dialogue.

The idea of collaboratory spaces with interactions to solve problems requires a much richer user experience and exchange of materials than is available through current online tools. One recent new technology that starts to come close on interaction and idea sharing is HP’s “visual collaboration” SkyRoom. The new site allows for multiple people to work together using 3D visualization software.

The idea of sharing complex 3D models across the Internet with colleagues across the globe is a very compelling first step toward the richer idea of the metaverse. HP starts to reveal the benefits of rich, high-definition interactions that include audio, video and a design space for manipulation of 3D models between collaborators.

The kinds of complex problems that we face today require an interactive multimedia space like this. Imagine sharing rich 3D models of scientific data or models of better buildings or better infrastructure. There are barriers today for allowing even real-time model sharing within the same office. Imagine the possibilities when these barriers come down for interaction across the entire globe.

My sincere hope is that the next online collaboration and social media fad will take us in the direction of much richer interaction. Rather than constantly monitoring a stream of distracting information, it would be great to move toward more seldom but richer interaction. I’d love to experience the metaverse in my lifetime, and our planet desperately needs a collective knowledge base with rich problem-solving interactions.

The U.S. Geological Survey has been moving their The National Map (TNM) online viewing and download platform to the same foundation of technology that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) uses for Palanterra. The richer viewer application updates the delivery methods for base maps and topos with integrated download services. The new site is now publicly available as a Beta release, with promises for polishing by year’s end.

Of note are the wealth of tools here for rich map interaction. The Navigation menu includes the ability to find places based on coordinates or reverse geocode. The Advanced menu adds the ability to measure distance or area, add data, build queries or filters, buffer on points or selections, and add range rings. The Annotation menu allows users to add points, draw points, lines, polygons, squares and ellipses, and add text. There’s also the ability export annotations or upload shapefiles.

The advanced geospatial capabilities of this publicly-available viewer will provide a great introduction to more advanced mapping capabilities that go well beyond the standard commercial search-oriented viewers. It’s great to see that the technology has caught up with the vision, and that the government is leveraging previous investments in platform technology to spread capabilities across agencies!

Google dropped a few bombs yesterday regarding the data that appears in their free Google Maps application. Many in the geospatial industry were struggling to understand where they obtained some of their data, and several local government owners who sell or license such things as parcel data were wondering about the legality when they viewed such data on Google Maps.

Google announced that they now own their own data for the United States, having moved beyond their license with TeleAtlas to their own self-created data set. Microsoft has long touted the ownership of their own data as a differentiator, and has sold tailored map services because they were unrestricted by data licenses. It will be interesting to see if Google makes the same appeals to local governments and businesses to set up the types of branded portals that Microsoft has been creating.

Google has also added the capability to directly create a map marker to add locations or note corrections, and you can be notified by e-mail when the change takes place. This map correction and input capability has been building for some time within their interface, but now it’s much more embedded and intuitive with a Report a Problem link in the lower right of the map or as a link in a right-click pull-down menu. This ease of reporting will certainly make their data much fresher, and may make Google Maps more of a threat to the user-generated OpenStreetMaps.

Google has added parcel data for many cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Antonio, Portland, Oregon and various other locations throughout the United States. The parcel layer is used primarily within Google Maps for finding addresses. The detail certainly isn’t good enough for the types of queries and title checks that are done with property boundary data, but it does have implications for others that are aggregating national parcel data. Mainly, what does Google intend to do with this data, and will the public availability create a backlash from the public that are seeing this data publicly displayed at a nationwide scale for the first time.

The implications of this news is slowly being absorbed in the geospatial community. The large geospatial data providers TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ have the most to lose with this freely available data on Google’s platform. The free availability of this data means far fewer customers.

Many smaller companies that have carved out interesting niches within the geospatial data space already felt threatened by Google, and now they have reason to feel even more threatened. Companies that pinned their prospects on location-based services and local marketing have seen their prospects slowly erode as Google has added ads directly on maps, and has aggregated an increasing number of points of interest. The most up-to-date map will win this race. Google has always had the resources, and now they have the tools to rapidly update the currency of their data.

Most of the companies that sell geospatial services to businesses largely pin their profits on their ability to deliver data that is hard to acquire. These companies have spent considerable sums obtaining and polishing their data and data delivery tools for the business market. With Google now adding more and more data, and without data licensing restrictions, there will likely be a number of business models failing in the near future.

Google has long prided themselves on constant updates of their map products with weekly releases of incremental updates. With this latest broad unveiling of a large number of features and developer tools, the company has once again become the dominant disruptor in the geospatial space. With the pace of change on the geospatial data front, it’s certainly tough to build a business around geospatial data or to predict where all of the activity on the “free” data front will lead.

Google has announced on their Blog that they’ve made inroads in computer vision, enabling computers to quickly identify images of 50,000 landmarks with 80% accuracy. Google mentions in the post that the effort is aimed at unlocking information from pixels now that they have such a strong handle on unlocking information in text. The ability to catalog and recognize images of the real world plays into the idea of augmented reality and also has implications for building digital city models.

Image recognition adds another means to locate your position in addition to your compass and GPS receiver. The image pattern recognition in its current form just recognizes a landmark among other similar photos, but with enough images and information, it’s feasible that your camera angle and perspective could provide another means to pinpoint your location. If the computer can recognize your location from an image, there stands to reason that you could access information by zooming into a specific detail of that image.

The computer-assisted cataloging of images will help to cluster the massive amount of images on such sites as Picasa and Panoramio. The ability to recognize, and then locate images, could be compiled into a navigable digital reality along the lines of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology.

The key to this announcement in my mind is the ability to make sense of crowd-sourced image capture. The amount of shared pixel-based information is still in its infancy, with rather poor image quality from cell phones, and often long-delayed uploads to the Web.The current unrest in Iran, and the exciting development of citizen-based journalism from cell phone photos and videos points to the possibility for greater real-time interaction with far-flung locations.

In the future, sharing real-time capture from handheld devices that are automatically cataloged and searchable, will help make us all citizens of the planet. And the ability to move forward and backward in time through the images will provide an incredible insight into the dynamic nature of our surroundings.

I was just checking out the new interface to Google Maps Street View by looking at my neighborhood, and I was mysteriously teleported to a rural road in Boulder County. I just clicked to travel down the street that I was on, and I made an inexplicable jump. It was rather surreal, as it happened to be a road that I’ve traveled many times with a nice view of the Flatirons. Perhaps that’s a future feature for exploration — beam me to a random spot nearby.

I noticed some other anomalies today with Google Maps, such as the inability for 30 minutes to view any map at all regardless of zoom level. After years of use, this is the first time that I’ve run into such problems. Must be some issues with their servers or is it my connection?

I really like the new interface that gives you a more intuitive cursor that can be clicked on the ground ahead of you or on the face of a building to zoom in. There’s much more of a 3D perspective with this new tool, and it points to many potential applications for signs and street markers that will allow us to explore this virtual world more completely.

Having recently attended both ASPRS and SPAR, I feel immersed in remote sensing and geospatial data collection. Both events  included much information about 3D data creation, storage and visualization, and I saw many impressive presentations that showcased software tools that are making inroads into navigable digital realities at a high degree of realism.

It’s quite amazing how quickly technology is evolving to capture large geographies in 3D. Now that we’re approaching the means to capture and distribute highly detailed digital realities that include interior spaces, it got me thinking more conceptually about the idea of having a digital memory of place. This goes beyond the idea of a geographic information system that incorporates time for temporal analysis, toward more of a far-forward look at what our digital memories of place might become.

I choose the term “memory” in part because of a recent Wired article about a woman who has amazing recall of where she’s been and what she’s seen.  What if we all had the capability to recall and visualize the where and when instances from our past or visualize the changes that occur in the environments around us through time. Exploring and sharing the rich visual experience of change around us admittedly has some creepy elements, but I’m betting the positive aspects of this awareness will win out over time.

Lapsing Time

Time lapse photography provides a great visual representation of change through time that gives a glimpse into how we might browse the sped up activities that take place around us. The 1983 feature-length film Koyaanisqatsi left a lasting impression on me for its choreographed exposure of the impact of technology on the environment, and for the many time lapse sequences that speed time to illustrate change.

Another visual feast of Earth observation is the series Planet Earth. The high-resolution views of flocking birds and other large-scale animal interactions gives a compelling sense of the activity of life on Earth that has yet to be adequately captured by any computer system.

The future of digital memory will certainly include an ability to visualize change in a similar time-lapse fashion, including windows onto phenomenon that we may not readily see with our own eyes. Speeding up or slowing down the world around us as it occurred will provide tremendous insight when we can view the different triggers that have brought about observable change.

Capturing Our Lives

Social media is altering how we capture the daily workings of our lives. We seem compelled to adopt more and more means of recording the minutia of our daily existence, including voice, pictures and daily observations. The idea of a digital memory is an eventuality in light of this growing compulsion to capture and collect our thoughts and experiences.

The drive to record and relive events has been with us forever, but we’re just beginning to realize the promise and capability of digital storage and retrieval for this purpose. Search engines that can pull up text or recorded words only scratch the surface of the searches that will become possible when we can index and query the past as if it were current reality.

Observations Enhanced

I recently re-read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold in which the author narrates the chronological observations of change on a rural Wisconsin farm. Captured here in detail are the seasonal changes of wildlife and plants on this piece of land, along with some of the unique geological and topological features that make this land unique, and glimpses into history of how the land has evolved.

These detailed observations of the natural world provide fascinating insight that reads like a mystery novel as assumptions are tested based on observations, and details of interactions are revealed. Just imagine the capability to capture and parse all these interactions to visually and quantifiably observe the workings of nature.

We have a broad conceptual understanding of earth system interactions and we endeavor to manage our lands and hold on to biological diversity. Despite our best efforts, there are many threatened and endangered species, and the forces upon them are often too large and too long in the making to turn around. There are also many of these instances where we simply don’t know where to start.

As we continue to add to our observations and our ability to visualize, analyze and explore these recordings, we may yet reach this concept of a digital memory of place. And there will be many mind boggling insights along the road toward this far-off goal.

REFERENCES

Koyaanisqatsi, while somewhat dated now, is viewable in full on YouTube

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Yesterday at SPAR 2009, earthmine, Inc. launched a new street-level 3D mapping platform and an innovative business plan to leverage partners for the data collection process. The earthmine plan is to create a 3D geospatial data mine of urban environments with much more detail and accuracy than current street-level data providers such as Google’s StreetView. The company has been around for three years, and won a Crunchies Award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement at TechCrunch in January 2008, but this event marked the commercial availability of the collection platform.

I spoke with Anthony Fassero co-founder and co-CEO and Paul Smith, chief strategy officer and former co-founder of GlobeXplorer about the technology and their business plan. The company has a pixel-based collection platform with stereo-panoramic cameras that capture imagery at 50 megapixel resolution, with each pixel retaining latitude, longitude and elevation coordinates with an accuracy of less than one meter. The Berkeley, Calif.-based company has collected 12 cities on the West Coast, and aims to involve partners to ramp up the collection process. The Project Partner and Collection Partner programs give partners the option of purchasing the hardware or contracting to have earthmine collect data using earthmine operated vehicles.

Project Partners contract to have earthmine collect data, which is provided online as a service to be ingested into CAD or GIS environments. Collection Parners own and operate earthmine data collection systems, receive all earthmine software and services, including the online data delivery capability for their customers and an API for custom solution development.

The underlying techology for this system was developed over many years for the Mars Exploration Rover Missions and Earthmine has an exclusive lincense for the software and algorithms from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Satellier-Screampoint has just launched a three-dimensional digital city solution for the construction industry in India. The solution aims at modeling projects in 3D on a real-time basis.

The corporate website for the company promotes a 4d/5D digital city management solution, but my attempts to access the site today met with broken links.

Read more here in this story in Financial Express.