Published at June 3, 2008
in general.
I’ve talked about Photosynth by Microsoft before, and still think it’s a pretty impressive piece of software that makes exploring photographs easy and cool. The benefit that Photosynth has going for it is that it can automatically scrape photo sites, find similar images, and create the environment for navigation automatically. Sadly the current builds are only for Windows computers.
Today Google owned Panoramio unveiled a similar interface for images (click on ‘look around’), but it’s built in Flash. You can click around an environment by viewing similar photos from different angles, with different zooms etc. I looked at it earlier today and was mildly impressed. What drove me to write about it is that I learned of an almost identical website that has been around for 5 months called OpenPhotoVR. The Flash interfaces and actual morphing between images is eerily similar. He talks about the similarities at his blog. What OpenPhotoVR offers is a manual interface for creating your own scenes, which could be a pretty interesting thing to do if you have a day to kill. The automated Photosynth method is obviously the better solution, but OpenPhotoVR provides GPL’d source code, so the masses could cook up something pretty interesting.
Published at June 3, 2008
in general.
Machu Picchu, the fabled lost city of the Inca, has a new history to explore with new evidence that Hiram Bingham was not the first European to find the city in 1911. New evidence shows that it was first visited in 1867 by an obscure German entrepreneur named Augusto Berns, who apparently looted the tombs with the Peruvian government’s blessing. This discovery was made by Paolo Greer, who in 1978 discovered an old map of the area and subsequently traced Berns’ activities through documents in the National Library of Peru. The structures were known by local in the area, but to them it was nothing to spectacular — as it was something they just always lived with. They led Hiram to the site in 1911 and got little credit in the subsequent fan fair. This revelation about when the first European found the site should do little do sway the Peruvians gratitude to Hiram, as it was still his discovery that helped turn it into a profitable tourist destination.
In an effort to select the best of the best the Canadian Space Agency has launched a rare cross-Canada campaign to hire as many as six new astronauts. It’s the third time since 1983 that the agency has held a public recruiting drive for wannabe astronauts. Thousands of applicants will be reduced to about 1,000 by a computer program, then reduced to 120 by a small selection committee. That number will be chopped again to 40 after a series of medical tests and interviews, and a host of aptitude and skills tests will bring the final number to 20 applicants. Think you have what it takes? Learn about the opportunity and how to apply at the Canadian Space Agency website.
Published at June 3, 2008
in general.
There was an article today in The Toronto Star about the Shroud of Turin, a large piece of linen believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus by some of the Christian faith. The article says that the shroud will be put back on public display in 2010, and that it has only been on public display four times in the 20th century. When I read ‘four times’ my mind went to my time in Peru in 2005 when the Santa Catalina Monastery had a large poster out front with an image of the shroud advertising, what I assumed was, a viewing of the fabric. I recall that I skimmed the poster, as it was in Spanish, and noticed that the event had ended. To think I could have seen the shroud was a mildly interesting prospect, but I thought no more of it since it was out of my hands.
The article went on to say that the last time the shroud was on display was for the Catholic jubilee year in 2000. Hold on, those dates don’t add up. I could have sworn I saw it in Arequipa, Peru in 2005. I pulled up the photo I had taken of the poster, and further examination revealed a heading I must have skimmed since I was only seeking the date of the show: ‘Exposición de Réplica’. Even my limited Spanish can translate that to ‘Exhibition of Replica’. What is interesting about this is that the date of the exhibition is right below that title. Talk about selective reading. I guess I have to amened my story now.
Published at June 2, 2008
in general.
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I wanted to play around with GPS, geotagging, and Google Maps this weekend so I put together this map of a road trip I made through Limmen National Park with a mate while in Australia. He had a GPS unit that recorded our route, which he emailed to me. Sadly the unit didn’t collect time data alongside the waypoints, thus I was unable to automatically geotag my photos from the GPS data, using ‘time’ as the linking data. There were a few errors in the GPS data (dropped signal) which accounts for the straight lines on the map. I used Adam Franco’s wonderful ‘flickr PhotoSet to KML‘ script to generate a KML of my photo set that I combined with the GPS data in Google Earth. From Google Earth it was as simple as saving that combined data to a single KMZ file and uploading it to my server. Once the file was online Google Maps could read the file and create the map that is embedded above.
A relatively new addition to Google Maps is the ability for the viewer to turn on/off Wikipedia and photo data from Panoramio via the ‘more’ button. Panoramio has some photos in the area the map above shows, though I feel a few of them lack accuracy.
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