the Art of Geography weblog

Wed 22 Oct 2008

Forest Park map updated

Posted by erik under Maps
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Panel #1, the southern-most of the 4 panel mapset has been updated thanks to feedback from users of the map. Thank you S.H., J.R., E.S., and others who wrote in.

http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/

Wed 25 Jun 2008

Introducing Walk There! 50 treks in and around Portland and Vancouver

From www.oregonmetro.gov

book cover “Introducing Walk There! Metro’s new guide to great places to walk in the Portland-Vancouver area. The book will lead you on 50 explorations of newly acquired urban natural areas, scenic parks, historic neighborhoods and fascinating main streets. Detailed maps and route descriptions will help you discover the region’s rich history and varied landscapes while you enjoy the benefits of walking.

Walking is one of the easiest and most effective activities you can do to tighten your wallet and your waistline. If you drive less, you save more by avoiding the costs of gasoline and parking. Walking is one of the safest activities you can do to maintain your health. Mile for mile you burn as many calories walking as you would jogging, but with far less stress on your joints. Walking also helps the environment. You can reduce your carbon footprint by shifting short trips from your car to your feet.

Metro developed the new guide in partnership with local governments and community groups and with support from Kaiser Permanente. The book will be distributed through health education classes and community walking events and programs. The 50 walking route maps and descriptions are available in a pocket-sized book or for download…”

The culmination of a tremendous effort by a wide-ranging team, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to design the walking maps in this guide.

Thu 29 May 2008

Art of Geography project: maps for Portland Forest Hikes: Twenty Close-In Wilderness Walks

Posted by erik under Maps
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I’m pleased to announce the availability of a book by James Thayer titled “Portland Forest Hikes: Twenty Close-In Wilderness Walks”. Here are twenty wilderness hikes within twenty miles of downtown Portland, Oregon, less than a half hour’s ride from the city. Adventurers at all skill levels will be surprised by the remoteness and remarkable beauty of these easy woodland escapes. This pocket-sized companion includes maps, bus access, basic conditions, flora, fauna, and local history. Choose the shorter walks for kids or rugged routes for the ambitious. Half the trails explore lesser-known wooded hillsides in Forest Park. Others venture farther north into rarely described prime Oregon hiking country in the Tualatin Mountains for the thrill of the wild at the city’s back door.

Note that by providing a link (or if you buy the book) I get no additional income. I did enjoy checking these interesting trails out, and it was a pleasure working with Timber Press. This project was completed about a year ago.

Wed 16 Apr 2008

Start! Walking America: The American Heart Association’s National Start! Walking Day Is today

Posted by erik under General
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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.html

Sun 23 Mar 2008

University of Arizona SBS Developments magazine uses Art of Geography painting

Posted by erik under Art
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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.

Cover of SBS Developments magazine

Sun 2 Mar 2008

Announcing the new Forest Park map

Posted by erik under Maps , Wilderness
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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

Mon 25 Feb 2008

Pocket Virtual Worlds

Posted by erik under VRlog
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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.)

Mon 21 Jan 2008

Another way to stitch panoramas using Photoshop

Posted by erik under VRlog
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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

Fri 28 Dec 2007

December was art month at the Art of Geography

Posted by erik under Art
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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.

Sat 10 Nov 2007

New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light

Posted by erik under Macintosh , VRlog
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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.)

Wed 7 Nov 2007

How geosavvy is Mac OS X Leopard?

Posted by erik under Macintosh , Maps
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“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…)

Sun 21 Oct 2007

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

Posted by erik under Maps , VRlog
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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.)

Forest Park map updated

Introducing Walk There! 50 treks in and around Portland and Vancouver

Art of Geography project: maps for Portland Forest Hikes: Twenty Close-In Wilderness Walks

Start! Walking America: The American Heart Association’s National Start! Walking Day Is today

University of Arizona SBS Developments magazine uses Art of Geography painting

Announcing the new Forest Park map

Pocket Virtual Worlds

Another way to stitch panoramas using Photoshop

December was art month at the Art of Geography

New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light

How geosavvy is Mac OS X Leopard?

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

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