flutter: Realtime Social Media Mapping

We are always wary of any description text that states 'one of the most interesting things you'll watch all day' but it is actually a really neat movie and product, so we'll let the marketing department off this time - flutter:



Written in Adobe Flex, the application mashes up ESRI's ArcGIS Online mapping services with some of the most popular media feeds available today: Twitter, Flickr, & YouTube. The music leaves us waiting to see 'Matt' as it seems to the same track used in http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/ which kind of takes the focus away just a little bit.

See http://www.dbmediastudio.com/samples/mashup/ to see it running live, its quite hypnotic to watch.

Bing Streetside: Flickr in 3D Space, 3D Transitions and Notable Potential

Microsoft have just just rolled out a new application that is currently in a tech preview phase that pulls photos from Flickr®, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos and then overlays them by stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The new application called Streetside Photos is currently available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada) to view your Flickr photos in a whole new way. We gave it a spin this morning and captured the video below, it has huge potential to view historic photos and crowd source the latest imagery.

Note how the 3D transitions between scenes and how the photos become part of the panorama:



See the post over on the Microsoft site for full details on Streetside or jump direct to the Streetside Photos application.

Building Rome in a Day: A 3D City via Flickr

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google Images, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset for computer vision and computer graphics research. With billions of such photos now online, these collections should enable huge opportunities in 3D, visualization, image-based rendering, recognition, and other research areas. The Graphics and Imaging Laboratory of the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering are at the cutting edge of research based around crowd sourced imagery and 3D modelling.

In their project 'Bulding Rome in a Day' the group considered the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. The aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

The movie below details thier sample work using 58,000 images of Dubrovnik sourced from Flickr:



If you do anything today check out their Building Rome in a Day page for further movies and details.

du on Flickr

We have been rummaging around Flickr this afternoon for various reasons and we thought we would use their embed tool to share some of our images:

We also have an open Digital Urban group allowing readers to share their urban related images - embedded below are the images submitted so far:



You can join our group and share your images on the blog via http://www.flickr.com/groups/digitalurban/

Flickr Spatial Visualisation

(un)photographed Spain from senseablecity on Vimeo.

The movie above comes out of the MIT SENSEable city lab, visualising GPS tagged photographs of Spain on Flickr. Analyzing the tagged information allows MIT to follow the trail that each Flickr photographer travels through Spain.

(Un)photographed Spain maps thousands of these public, digital footprints over one year. As photos overlap in certain locations, they expose the places that attract the photographer's gaze . In contrast, the absence of images in other locations reveal the unphotographed spaces of a more introverted Spain.

Take a look at http://senseable.mit.edu/worldseyes/ for more information and movies on the project.

Link picked up via those nice people over at Very Spatial.

Flickr/Twitter Vision 3D Earth View

Flickrvision - A Global View of Flickr Uploads from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The movie above illustrates Flickrvision, a near real-time update displaying geolocated images uploaded to the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates can be viewed via either Google Maps or in their new custom 3D Earth view.

We have it running on a screen in the office as its simply fascinating (some would say hypnotic) to sit back and watch images being uploaded according to location. Twittervision offers the same but with tweets replacing images, it is almost more compulsive viewing to see what people are twitting about around the globe.

View Flickrvision

View Twittervision

Flickrvision and Twittervision are coded by David Troy