Embedding Panoramas into Blogger: Update

This is an experimental post to see if its possible to embed a 'click and drag' panorama into a blog post using a flash based viewer.

As an update to the original post you can now view the panorama fullscreen by clicking the right hand side icon:

Click and Drag to look around:

How is it done?

1) See http://flashpanoramas.com/player/ for the viewer.

2) Create your webpage with the viewer and your panorama

3) Embed in blogger/wordpress using an iframe as per the code below:

How to Embed Flash Panoramas in Blogger and WordPress

Another test of embedding Flash based panoramas into Blogger - this time with the Houses of Parliament at Night, click and drag to look around:

An example of Gothic Architecture the Houses of Parliament were constructed between 1840 and 1888. The panorama is taken outside the main tower near Westminster Bridge and the River Thames. The tower stands 320 foot tall and is named after the largest bell, 'Big Ben' which weighs over 13 tons, and was cast in 1858 at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London.

How is it done?

1) See http://flashpanoramas.com/player/ for the viewer.

2) Create your webpage with the viewer and your panorama

3) Embed in blogger/wordpress using an iframe as per the code below:

Digital Geography Booklet: Available Now

We are pleased to announce the availability of our booklet: Digital Geography - Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments. Printed in full colour the 10 x 8 inch booklet runs to 64 pages of insights and tutorials on Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google Maps, Panoramas and Second Life.

With a focus on Neogeography, Web 2.0 and the various emerging techniques for urban visualisation the booklet has been written as a preview to the forthcoming Digital Urban 'recipe book' to be published fourth quarter of 2008.


The booklet is being sold at below cost price and is available now. For all those that have emailed to reserve copies, thank you, these are set aside and guaranteed for shipping soon as payment is received.


Priced at £9.99 (worldwide postage and packaging is free) it can be purchased direct via the Buy Now link using PayPal or any standard Credit/Debit card:

Alternatively you can fill out our Order Form (download in .doc or .pdf format) and FAX it direct to our offices at +44 (0)20 7813 2843. Payment is £9.99 per booklet with world wide postage and packing currently free of charge.

If you have any questions drop us a email or use the usual comment link.

We hope you enjoy the booklet.....

Embedding Panoramas into a Blog: Westminster Abbey

This is an experimental post to see if its possible to embed a 'click and drag' panorama into a blog post using a flash based viewer.

Westminster Abbey is a work of outstanding architecture, constructed between the 13th and 16th centuries. The Abbey has been the location for numerous Royal Weddings as well as every Coronation since 1066. The building as it is today features the west towers which were completed to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor.

All being well you should be able to view the panorama below.

Click and Drag to look around:

We have over 100 panoramas on the blog so if this works for the majority of readers it could make a nice way to revisit some of the best.... (?)

AAG Conference, Boston

We are heading off to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference in Boston on Wednesday. The AAG is always a good place to touch base with the latest research, we are presenting a paper on Saturday for those interested, the full details are below:

Abstract Title:
Web 2.0 and CyberInfrastructure: GeoVue Tools and Virtual Worlds for Geographic Visualisation

is part of the Paper Session:
Build it, Mapt it, Web it

scheduled on Saturday, 4/19/08 at 10:10 AM.

Author(s):
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Dr* - University College London

Abstract:

Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionizing the way in which we present, share and analyze geographic data. In this paper we outline and provide working examples using our suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies.

GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualization of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth and Second Life. These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualize for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer.

With our applications of GMap Creator, Image Cutter, PhotoOverlay Creator, GEarth Creator and finally MapTube, we detail ways to intelligently visualize and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information.

Keywords:

google earth,web 2.0, second life, visualisation, google maps

Fingers crossed for good weather as we are packing our panorama kit, all being well our previously delayed (due to fog in Hong Kong) HDR tutorial should go online next week.

Agents in the City: Vision

Our last weeks series of posts on 3D Agent Based Models using 3D Max has been interesting (at least we have found it interesting). It is easy to set up any number of agents to swarm or wander within a set radius but adding behaviours beyond swarming is more difficult.

It seem to be down to 'vision' and how far the agents can 'see' ahead of them. In 3D Studio Max agents seem to only be capable of a complete 360x180 degree field of view or avoidance, this creates either large areas of exclusion or areas where agents fail to 'see' objects coming.

Our latest movie below illustrates this, the agents are now in our city model from the Greeble a City Tutorial:



At the moment the agents tend to get run over by the bus and roam inside the buildings, despite being set to avoid, still it is work in progress...

gisagents.blogspot.com have an interesting post on Pacman: is it an agent-based model? for those interested - a 3D Pacman would actually be quite easy as its a simple 'Seek' behaviour interlinked with paths.

Simulating Traffic in 3D Cities: Agents, Shockwaves and Grids

Simulating traffic is a science in itself with each car acting as an agent that is aware of its surroundings. It is notoriously difficult to create convincing traffic flow in 3D packages without input from specialist simulations and as such its a good challenge for our recent explorations of using agents in 3D Max to populate city models.

New Scientist highlighted the 'Shockwave' theory of traffic simulation this month with an article on how a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.



With simple agents in 3D Max our first movie interestingly produces similar results:



If you then set up 'three teams' linked to a network with behaviour based on varying speed and avoidance calculations you can create a basic traffic flow simulation.



As we have said, these are first steps and there are some obvious issues to iron out with the aim to import the traffic flow into scenes such as our 'Greeble City Tutorial' model illustrated below:

Interestingly the work going on just to our left using the Crysis game engine for traffic flow is proceeding at a notable rate, we should have a movie of this tomorrow...

Read more about the Shockwave Theory and NetLogo.

Towards Modelling Behaviour in 3D Cities: 3D Agents for Architecture

The second in what is looking like a series of posts on 3D Agent Based Modelling in cities - in short on placing crowd, pedestrian and transport behavior into 3D models.

Yesterday's post covered our first steps, developing 'Ant Like' behaviors on a surface, our next movie displays a degree of intelligence in our agents:



The agents are now aware of the environment around them and each other, as such they avoid collisions while wandering around the surface. As we mentioned this is 'first step' work and we are aware that there are advanced crowd simulations out there. We are taking a slightly different approach and as ever with the blog we will write a tutorial on the system soon as its more advanced.


It would be interesting to hear any thoughts on this line of posts and if you would like to know more about agents take a look at http://gisagents.blogspot.com/

Agents in the City: First Steps to Crowd Based Architectual Modelling

Yesterday we posted about roads in 3d models and how small details begin to bring the 3d city to life. The same goes for pedestrians and modes of transport, in essence these objects populate the city and add a significant level of realism.

Crowd and transport simulation is at its roots down to 'Agents' or 'Objects' that are assigned a set of rules as to how to moves in relation to both the environment and other agents around them. 3D Studio Max has a built in 'Crowd and Delegate' system which can be used to assign behavior and therefore create realistic traffic of pedestrian systems in 3D space.

Our movie below displays our first tentative steps using the system to create an 'Ant Like' behavior on a surface:



Ok its far from a crowd in a city but the principle is there. We don't often put up 'early development' movies but this should be an interesting learning curve for anyone wanting to populate a 3D City. At the same time as using 3D Max we are also using Crysis for realtime agent based modelling, more on that a little later...

If you would like to know more about Agents take a look at http://gisagents.blogspot.com/ - a blog written a mere two desks away from where we are currently sat...

LightUp: Realtime Lighting in SketchUp

LightUp is creating quite a stir in the SketchUp community and for good reason. The plugin allows realtime lighting inside of SketchUp which by the looks of it dramatically improves the look of models.

The two YouTube movies below provide a preview:





The difference in quality is notable and this is one to watch, a beta website is online with a demo promised in the coming days/weeks.

See http://www.light-up.co.uk for full details.

You can follow the discussion on LightUp at the Sketchucation forums.

Thanks to Pedro for sending us the links...

Road Networks: Bringing 3D Greeble Cities to Life

Our Greeble City Tutorial provides a walk through on how to quickly and easily create a cityscape, complete with custom skyscrapers. Creating a city is all well and good but it is the fine details that brings a 3D city to life, the first of these is the road network.

Creating a road network in 3D Max is to be honest a tedious process but once they are in place complete with pavements (sidewalks) a basic render can begin to look more city like.

The three renders here are from our 'City Road Pack' which we will be uploading to TurboSquid or some other file sharing site free of charge. This should save anyone wanting to build a quick city having to go through the two day process of making roads. The pack will include a series of objects that will snap together to create a grid or path layout.

Soon as its ready to go we will put up a post, in the meantime if there are any other parts of cities that people would like to see let us know via the comment box.

We should also have a post on roads and agent based traffic simulation in Crysis later this week as well, the main Crysis tutorial has been delayed due to a 'shadow bug' in the latest build. Soon as this is fixed we will put the SketchUp/3D Max to Crysis tutorial online.

Maps and Stats: Visualisation with Google Docs

Google's Docs is something of a slow burner but it has notable potential for visualisation, especially for trends and basic mapping, such as the heat map illustrated above.

The YouTube movie below provides a 60 second introduction to the Google Spreadsheet API:



We will be looking at this closer in future posts as trend/map based visualisation is often too complicated for its own good, one thing Google does well is make things easy and that can only be a good thing...

See http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/ for examples and documentation.

Micro Origamic Architecture: 3x2 inch Buildings

This bought a smile to our faces here at digital urban - Micro Origamic Architecture - buildings created as pop up cards.

Origamic Architecture from Building to Card is a collection of exquisite pop-up card patterns by artist Ingrid Siliakus. Her work was recently featured in an exhibit at the American Craft Museum in New York - take a look at the YouTube movie below:



The music is kind of catchy as well....

See Ever More Design for more info and how to purchase your own Origamic Architecture.

US Census Drop's PDA, Adopts Pencil and Paper

Sometimes it is easy to overlook how good 'old' style technologies are. For example, pencil and paper has automatic 100% handwriting recognition, is zoomable, viewable from any angle in any light conditions and is compatible with any number of filing systems.

As such the US Census Bureau will be ditching its PDAs in favor of paper and pencil for the 2010 census. To be honest this makes sense on a number of levels.

Sure it goes against our natural urge to geo-tag, document and process data on site via an edge connection, preferably while streaming video, but sometimes its easier to go old school.

We are just looking at our gps pda enabled mapping system for a campus route finder and thinking it might be better to use paper, a pencil and a compass - this could catch on.

Picked up via Engadget..

Live Geo-Located Video Feeds in Google Earth/Maps: Seero

The revolution in geo-location is continuing apace with video content combined with GPS location and live streaming making it the latest 'must have' on the block from the people at Seero.

Gadgets such as the Nokia N95 are ripe for such content being able to stream video live (more on that in a future post), track the location and send data to a server all at the same time.

Seero breaks new ground by being the first platform to allow its users to broadcast live and
on-location through Google Earth. Viewers can load Seero's global KML feed in GEarth and see
the GPS positioning of each broadcaster along with their live video feed.
Justin Cutillo, Seero's CEO, describes the new feature: "the end goal is to utilize Google Earth and Seero's broadcasting platform to create an accurate and dynamic representation of what's happening in the world and where it's taking place."

It really is one of the moments that you have to take a look at the demo, sit back and then think how amazing is the ability to stream your location, video and sound live to a blog, Google Map or Google Earth.

New releases tend to wash over us at times but this is one to watch. If our N95 had unlimited data we would be streaming our route home on the 24 bus to Camden Town (just because we could) but sadly in the UK at least mobile Internet is still expensive so a lot of N95 users have made the leap to iPhones due to unlimited data being part of the package.

View the demo.

iPhone in the City: Navizon - Location and Buddy Tracker

The iPhone's location finder is interesting, lacking the accuracy of the Nokia N95's dedicated GPS unit yet able to provide a fix in under 10 seconds, it is arguably more useful than a standard satellite navigation system.

Our N95 was let down by a slow fix time, leaving us looking slightly foolish when friends asked where we were, only to pull out the latest gadget which five minutes later was still trying to access satellites. The iPhone on the other hand provides an almost instant location via triangulation of phone mast signals and known wifi points.

Accuracy is limited but it works and provides a quick and easy way to orientate yourself in the city, and now thanks to Navizon you can track your friends as well. Navizon is an application that builds on the iPhones 'locate me' feature, it tracks both your and any friends location every 10 seconds issuing you with an alert when they come into a predefined range.


You can add your friends to your Buddy list with a click of a button and then simply click on "Buddies" to see where they are on a map. Your friend will receive an notification with a link to click on and you will be able to see each other's location.

The YouTube movie embedded below provides a walkthough of Navizon:




This is the first example we have seen of near real-time location tracking of people on a consumer device. It is perhaps a landmark moment in geo-software and an indication of the route ahead as we are all becoming increasingly 'geo-located'.

There is a free trial available and more details from http://www.navizon.com

ipod City: Audio Bubbles & Journeys

A while ago we put up a couple of posts examining the impact of the ipod/walkman revolution on how we perceive and experience the cityscape. Audio devices are standard wear in the city and with them the user is immersed in a 'MTV World' where the city is the video and the traditional experience of urbanity is lost to a dub beat or a guitar riff.

To illustrate this point is our walk this afternoon down Tottenham Court Road while listening to Utah Saints:



Audio spaces are a developing area of interest and Matt Collins, a final year student studying Multimedia Technology and Design at Brunel Unversity, has come up with merging peoples audio choice with GPS data. Matts project is entitled 'Here are our Journeys' the work explores people’s interaction with music they listen to and the journeys they take. Using data logged by user’s iPods’ and GPS units’ the project collates people’s journeys’ and then represents them online where they can be shared with others.



It is well worth taking a look at Matt's site and the journeys uploaded and visualised so far via the freely available software: Here are our Journeys.