the Art of Geography weblog

April 16 is the American Heart Association’s National Start! Walking Day. The call to action is simple: Americans should fit 30 minutes of walking into their workday.Studies reveal that American jobs have become more sedentary and that employees are working 164 more hours a year than they did 20 years ago. The Start! movement works with employers and the 142 million Americans in the workplace to create a culture of walking before, during or after work.”Incorporating walking into your daily routine is one of the easiest changes you can make. You can hop off the bus or subway a stop or two earlier; you can take the stairs at work or park farther away,” said American Heart Association President Dr. Daniel Jones. “There are lots of little ways to incorporate a few more steps, which can truly have life-changing results.”http://sev.prnewswire.com/health-care-hospitals/20080415/DC1953415042008-1.htmlBank federal finance home loan office<&name=a>
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Thank you to Lori Harwood and Christine Scheer for picking some Art of Geography art for the cover of their magazine, and reproducing the color/tonality so well.

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Just in time for the first trillium blossoms of spring, the Forest Park map is ready for general use. This map went through several months of development and a couple months of beta testing. The current version of the map is v615 — if you have an older version, make sure to download the latest from
http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/. How can you tell what version you have? The version number is a small notation on the right side under the title of panel 4.

I can safely say this is the best map I’ve made to date (although there are maps in the pipeline which may top this). Every aspect of my park map approach has been refined, improved, and tested.

Some notes on the map:

The technique for arriving at more accurate trail paths using LiDAR is described in an article I wrote recently.

One of the challenges of the Forest Park map is that the park is very long and skinny, yet contains over 75 miles of trails (see image to right of the park as it would look in a single panel).

I went to great lengths to ensure that the map would be usable by someone with just an average letter-size color printer. By average I mean a color inkjet printer that sells for $50-$80 (printers in this class can print at over 750 dots per inch, which should be fine for these maps). In order to ensure this level of usability, the map was broken into four panels, each of which is designed to be readable on a letter-size piece of paper (21.4 cm x 28 cm for European readers). One side-effect of straining every facet of the map layout to meet this goal is that the title/scale/compass information is not positioned in the same place on every panel.

If you wanted to make the map pages more portable, you could use double-sided matte paper and print panels 1 and 3 on one sheet of paper, and panels 2 and 4 on the second (that way you can still overlap adjacent panels). If you have an Epson printer, I find that Epson’s heavyweight matte paper works very well for this map, and recommend printing (in the print dialog box) with the highest quality setting that is available for the paper you are using. Printing the maps in black and white won’t work very well–there’s too much information which is designed around color.

One goal of the map was to facilitate using public transit to access the park. So three MAX stops are shown, as are bus stops along the eastern edge of the park. The Trimet bus-stop (and stop IDs) are not shown for every single bus line in the map extent, as it would overwhelm the map with transit info, most of which would not be relevant.

If you want to link to the map, the permanent URL to use is not this weblog post but http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/

–erik

Pocket Virtual Worlds: “The technology, a result of a partnership between Case Western Reserve and Bowling Green, uses a mobile device to explore photograph-based virtual worlds. There’s no GPS, nor Wi-Fi used, as I understand it, for the navigation of the worlds. It’s not clear how the datasets are knit together. Even if I don’t quite follow how it works, the New Media Consortium identified it as one of six emerging technologies in its 2008 Horizon Report. The end use?

This three-dimensional photographic virtual world is likely to be introduced to higher education and specific organizations within the next five years.

- Pocket Virtual Worlds website (flash demo available)

- The BG News“

(Via All Points Blog.)

Creating Panoramic Images in Photoshop CS3 using Auto-align Layers

The Auto-Align Layers feature is a great new feature that will make assembling your panoramic pictures a breeze

via Creative Mac

December was art month at the Art of Geography. A two foot square mounted print of Hydromancy at the antipodes of Elysium sold at a gallery, and another painting was selected by a magazine to use on their cover. I will post the details of the magazine issue as soon as it comes out.

New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light: “Naked Light, a unique new image editor, offers a simplistic interface as well as advanced features; Naked Light will allow users to take advantage of non-destructive image editing. The application is advertised as re-inventing how image editing works, featuring node-based compositing and live filters, as well as a concept called ‘Infinite Resolution…

Requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

(Via The Macintosh News Network.)

“Are you wondering what the photo georeferencing “feature” in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is like? Find a photo that has latitude and longitude already encoded in its EXIF metadata. Open it with the Preview Application, turn on the inspector, and voila, under the “More Info” tab you get the metadata above a small world map:”

http://www.ogleearth.com/2007/11/how_geosavvy_is.html
(more…)

Microsoft Virtual Earth adds Birds-Eye View to 3D Globe: “

We all somewhat guess this would be coming around and tonight Microsoft releases Birds-eye View for their 3D Globe. They’ve taken those great Birds-eye View images from the 2D maps and using Photosynth they stiched them all together to create a ‘3D World’. Now of course this isn’t a true 3D, but if you’ve ever tried out Photosynth, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Virtual Earth Blog spells it out quite nicely.

For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it’s relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There’s still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don’t appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete ’scenes’ instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.

In 3D, the same challenges remain, but are easier to address with client side managed code. the result is a user interface that borrows concepts from MSR’s Photosysnth to allow you to navigate more fluidly and naturally than what is possible with a javascript based client.

…

The street level images are nice from a navigating sense, but I always feel like I’m in a canyon. These Birds-eye view images are much more open and having them available in 2D or 3D really pushes Virtual Earth ahead of Google Maps in my book (now how about making the darn think work in Safari?). One thing that jumped out at me was how good Microsoft’s building models look. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the Birds-eye and the 3D model. For those who can’t install the 3D add on, take a look at the video below.

(Via Spatially Adjusted with James Fee.)

Carnegie Mellon University researchers, working with NASA Ames Research Center scientists, have developed an inexpensive robotic device that allows any digital camera to take gigapixel panoramic photographs, known as GigaPans. The technology is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. The system uses a tripod-like mount to allow digital cameras to take hundreds of overlapping images of landscapes, buildings, or rooms. Software developed by Carnegie Mellon and Ames is used to arrange the images in a grid and digitally merge them together to create a single image that could contain tens of billions of pixels. Carnegie Mellon has also created a Web site so users can upload and interactively explore the panoramic images in any format. “An ordinary photo makes it possible to cross language barriers,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute. “But a GigaPan provides so much information that it leads to conversations between the person who took the panoramas and the people who are exploring it and discovering new details.” Nourbakhsh hopes that GigaPan will help develop a community of producers and users. “GigaPan is not just about the vision of the person who makes the image,” Nourbakhsh says. “People who explore the image can make discoveries and gain insights in ways that may be just as important.”

Full article is at http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/September/sept26_gigapan.shtml

“Classic situation: You are in a church with a beautiful stain-glass window. You want to take a photo but you realize you have to make a choice: you either take a slow exposure shot of the window, meaning that the rest of the image will be way underexposed, or you try to take a photo of the whole thing, leaving the window very overexposed, meaning you will not see any of the beauty of the window. What do you do? Well, normally you have to make a choice, because the sad reality of either film or digital cameras is that they have a very limited dynamic range. That’s where Photomatix comes in and opens up a whole new world of photography for many of us who’ve tried in vein to get what is not possible otherwise. While this is a somewhat labor intensive process that includes a lot of post photography operations before you have your image, the end result is that you will get images that are simply not possible otherwise.”

http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/photomatix_review_of_hdr_image_creation_software/

“In short, I do like Stitcher. If you want to create multi-shot panoramas (e.g., more than eight images), the speed efficiency is reason enough to consider using Stitcher over Photoshop. …

Because of the limited new functionality in this version, I am only giving it a 3 “A” rating. If you are new to Stitcher, by all means, I strongly recommend the program. If you already have a copy, it is hard for me to tell you to spend your money unless the fish-eye lens and/or HDR features are sufficient enough.”