From an article currently in discussion on Slashdot. Very interesting for those that care. Here is their summary : "Creating 3D maps and worlds can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming. Also, the final result might not be all that accurate or realistic. A new technique developed by scientists at The University of Manchester's School of Computer Science and Dolby Canada, however, might make capturing depth and textures for 3D surfaces as simple as shooting two pictures with a digital camera — one with flash and one without. First an image of a surface is captured without flash. The problem is that the different colors of a surface also reflect light differently, making it difficult to determine if the brightness difference is a function of depth or color. By taking a second photo with flash, however, the accurate colors of all visible portions of the surface can be captured. The two captured images essentially become a reflectance map (albedo) and a depth map (height field)."

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The AnyGeo blog links us to an article from the GIS User website showcasing some of the "WOW" technologies shown at the ESRI UC. Head on over there to see all the youtube videos and read the article. From the GIS User article : "On the floor at the ESRI user conference. It’s always a flurry of activity and it’s always one of my favorite things to do at the UC… browse the exhibition hall floor and see all the great new apps and gadgets, while getting the low-down straight from the ESRI partners and solution providers. Read on for details of just a few of the great things we found on the floor at the 2008 International ESRI User Conference."

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Slashdot discuss a story about a scientific discovery regarding the mean geographic direction of cows. Their summary: "Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen have discovered that cows tend to point north. The researchers studied deer in the Czech Republic and looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth. The animals tended to face north when eating or resting. "We conclude that the magnetic field is the only common and most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment," the scientists wrote in an article. I guess cows will become the must-have item for long-distance hikers now. Having an edible compass would come in handy if you get lost." In addition to this Telegraph article, APB points to NPR and SS to the LA Times.

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The AGISRS list informs us of a new scientific journal named the Journal of Terrestrial Observation. The summary: "The Journal of Terrestrial Observation (JTO) publishes relevant, interesting, and challenging articles of research, analysis, or promising practice related to models, technologies, and applications associated with earth observation in the broadest sense. The Journal of Terrestrial Observation (JTO) is a quarterly, scholarly, peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory(PTO). The observatory project involves 30 faculty investigators from 20 departments within six schools at Purdue University. This important, timely Journal will be published simultaneously by Purdue University Press as a full-color, 96-page hardcopy journal and Web-based e-journal. JTO’s unique mission will be to examine the multi-disciplinary theories, models, technologies, and applications associated with earth observation in the broadest sense. The Journal will cover a wide range of topics including satellite remote sensing, aircraft reconnaissance, and proximate sensing utilizing in situ instrumentation. Periodic special issues devoted to specific emerging technologies and unique applications will accept both invited and openly-solicited articles for review"

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Over the Applied-GIS-RS mailing list (Slashgeo's cradle), H. Gyde Lund shares a 63-pages document about the old days of military imagery interpretation. Here's the background: "Back in the late 1950’s I had to take a course in photo interpretation as part of the forestry curriculum at Utah State University. In 1961, I went into the Army for two years. Having had the PI course qualified me to become an image interpreter through further education at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD. Upon completion of the course I volunteered for duty in Vietnam (the US was involved in a ‘police action’ in that country at that time. I receive orders to ship out, but about a week before I was supposed to leave, the Berlin Wall went up and the Army shipped me to Augsburg, Germany instead to serve my remaining tour of duty in the image interpretation section with the 24th Infantry Division. Most of our work was maintaining maps and aerial photos for the Division. Wanting more image interpretation work, I helped develop the above publication’ to sell our capabilities to the various unit commanders. I was discharged (honorably I might add) before the ‘publication’ came out so I do not know if it was helpful or not. As a side note, while in Germany, the Cuban Missile Crises came about. As proof of the involvement of Russia in Cuba, President Kennedy released a series of aerial and ground photos to Congress and the press. These eventually appeared in newspapers throughout the world including ‘Stars and Stripes’ in Germany. To avoid the hassle of working with classified materials, I saw this as an opportunity to get hold of an unclassified set of imagery of soviet equipment help train our staff. I wrote my congressman asking for a set and after about a month or so I received the same. I then put the images in an album so our staff could use and showed the album to the G2 (Intelligence Officer). He immediately wanted to classify the document. Fortunately logic prevailed and our staff was able to use the imagery openly."

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The Google Earth blog brings us news about this. Here is a snippet from their summary : "Last May I published a video demonstration of a cool iPhone application I saw at Where 2.0 which looked like Google Earth. The video demo was such a huge hit, Earthscape - the company who made it - quickly made it into a product you can now buy at the Apple store (available for $10)."

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Slashdot discuss a scientific article about the correlation between genetic and geographic structure in Europe. Their summary: "[Here's the] story from the New York Times about a team of scientists who were able to relate genetic differences to geographical origins. Countries such as Germany, Austria, and France occupy the central area of the genetic map, with Italy, Finland, and the UK being relative outliers. Quoting: "All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. ... Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago."

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Matt Giger has posted a live preview on his EarthBrowser blog showing the EarthBrowser globe embedded in the browser. From the article : "Good news! The US Space Command has just granted my request to redistribute satellite orbit data. Expect to see satellites coming to EarthBrowser soon." "Imagine a zero-install, completely programmable virtual globe that understands KML on your website. "

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From the Spatial Sustain blog : Today MapMart announced that Microsoft’s UltraCam imagery would be offered for download on the MapMart website. This announcement follows the report that Microsoft Virtual Earth data would available to ESRI users. This latest announcement leverages Microsoft’s considerable investment in imagery acquisition and places them in competition with all other imagery providers.

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From the GeoPDF blog : "Microsoft finally released Photosynth to the general public. This is a long awaited release for this very cool 3-D panorama creation solution. I have fooled around with OpenPhotoVR but did not have the time or patience to get it working properly. Photosynth will "synth" your world for you! Check out the Photosynth gallery to see all the cool scenes already in the archive. Be careful when you create your own...your photos will be publicly available."

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The GIS Lounge has an article presented at Siggraph about the automatic simplification of maps to produce tourist maps. From their summary : "Floraine Grable presented her work on automating tourists maps at last week’s SIGGRAPH conference.  While street level imagery as Google’s Street View and Microsoft’s Pictometry data are popular, Grable found that providing too much information isn’t helpful for tourist maps, stating, “When the maps show every building, every street, it’s very difficult to find specific sites.“  Grable, who is based at UC Berkeley, worked with ETH Zurich to develop software that would automate which buildings to include on a map depending on the focus of the tourist map.  In San Francisco all buildings were assigned a score based on their relevance as a tourist, shopping or dining site.  All buildings scoring above a threshold would then be automatically added to the map based on the category selected."

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From the GeoPDF blog : "In previous versions of Map2PDF for ArcGIS there was no way to view the GeoPDF back in ArcGIS. The latest release of this application allows you to do this! We are now able to bring in all the PDF map frames and layers then toggle them on and off just as you would a standard ArcGIS layer. Because it is treated as a standard ArcGIS layer, you can also export the content back out as a GeoPDF. Create GeoPDF --> work with GeoPDF in Reader --> View GeoPDF and annotations back in ArcGIS for further analysis."

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MacRumors.com offers a nice summary on the development of turn by turn GPS navigation software for the iPhone. From MR: " MSNBC recently spoke (via MacDailyNews) with several GPS manufacturers about their plans to develop a turn-by-turn GPS solution for the iPhone. While the manufacturers were unable to provide many details about their plans, TomTom reasserted that they do have GPS navigation working on the iPhone and that it works well [...]" See also some selected previous iPhone stories below.

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The GEB announced earlier this month that Google added new StreetViews for Australia and Japan. However, Slashdot discuss an article named "Google's Streetview Seen As Culturally Insensitive In Japan". Their summary: "Global Voices has a translation of an excellent open letter to Google by Osamu Higuchi, explaining that Street view is too invasive for Japanese traditional values when used in residential areas. Having lived here for ten years, most recently in an older residential area, I can attest to its accuracy — Living in such close proximity to your neighbors, it becomes necessary to 'not look' at everything that you might be able see from a place such as the street, where you may have a legal right to be. The cultural boundaries are simply different than those of the US."

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VectorOne runs two perspectives wondering if you think GIS as we know it will “disappear” into the cloud? From Jeff: "The Cloud is fertile ground for a GIS. A GIS is about much more than location alone. Its truest value and highest potential are exposed through the capability to perform spatial analysis, model and simulate. In a sense GIS is a 5-speed F1 racer that has been operating in second gear. The cloud has enormous potential to change that, shifting spatial gears and accelerating the wider use of GIS functionality. Buckle up - the ride is about to begin." From Matt: "Predominantly geospatial capabilities are purchased by organizations, and by companies of such a size and complexity that they feel they must control these systems, particularly when they’re of a critical nature to operations and/or contain proprietary information that must be kept from competitors. I also wonder how long performance, security and reliable accessibility issues will exist for Internet-based applications." In my numerous emails to catch up, I had the OGC newsletter with an article on the GeoCloud: "Given that the cloud computing platform and SaaS together are very similar (identical?) in their requirements for access to services and geospatial content, my belief is that OGC standards have the same value and provide the same benefits for the cloud as they do for the Grid community. It is only a matter of time before OGC standards are an integral component of the cloud." The ENTCHEV blog also offers several links to software that now supports cloud for geospatial applications. Spatially Adjusted also adds information. See also pertinent related stories below.

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From Mateusz Loskot's blog : "The libLAS project is getting closer to final release of 1.0.0 version. Today, Howard announced that 1.0.0 Beta 2 has been released. Source package is available at las-1.0.0b2.tar.bz2 (MD5)."

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Juan Ardila writes "Hello!I would like to suggest our podcast for your consideration. It is the first Geospatial podcast in Spanish language and we think it may be useful for some folks out there. We are very focused on the spatial information field, GIS and RS. Our feed is http://podespacial.com/rss. Who are we? ("Geography to Go") We are the first and leading Spanish speaker podcast in the geo spatial and geo information science and techniques. Started in 2006 and with 37 episodes by now, we dedicate our podcast episodes to the diffusion of concepts, developments, news, trends, and application of geospatial tools, techniques and products. As professionals working on the geo-sector, and producers of "Geografia Para Llevar", we are mainly interested on creating an informed and active community on the field and to share the curiosity and excitement that we feel through effective communication tools. You can access our blogpage and listen to our episodes in www.podespacial.com (website in Spanish). For an automatically translated version (and therefore not so good) of the site please follow this link. Enjoy! Podcast Geografia Para Llevar ("Geography to Go")" A little search indicates we mentioned this podcast over two years ago. In terms of podcasts for our community, there's always VerySpatial for which I listened to every episode up to about a year ago (if I could buy some more time...). Some related stories copied below.

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Richard Taylor writes "I have some news that I thought might be of interest to some in the slashgeo community. My company has just begun the release of an innovative sports application, called EarthgamZ, using the GE plug-in (web browser based). I invite you to take a look at http://www.earthgamz.com/. The "3D Olympics" button launches an example application that allows users to access the bios, medals won, and hometowns of all the U.S. Olympians. This is the small beginning and first public viewing of earthgamz.com, designed to be an exciting multi-sports and social website for fans, players, and teams worldwide. We are working with Sports Illustrated and GOLF.com here in the US on golf content and the results of our efforts will be available in the very near future. We have EarthgamZ working in facebook — it will be the first virtual globe application to be seamlessly integrated with social networking. When this is ready for public release, a link will appear on the earthgamz.com website that will allow you to download the application into your facebook profile. The future possibilities for this virtual globe sports social network are enormous."

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Slashdot has a discussion currently about some new updates to Photosynth. Make sure to check out the video before the site goes down. Here is their summary : "STFS Found an update to the PhotoSynth stories that we already ran. You might remember the amazing photo tourism demos. Well this new version kicks things up several notches with paths and color correction to more smoothly transition between photos taken in different lighting conditions. As before, this stuff is worth your time. Check it out."

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Slashdot is currently having a discussion about this article from the Washington Post. Here is their summary : "The Washington Post has a long investigative article on how more and more police departments are secretly planting GPS tracking devices on the cars of people they are investigating — usually without a warrant. After-the-fact court challenges on this technique have largely upheld such use of a GPS device, though the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that a warrant is required."

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