Bottom Up Building Alive on Google Earth

I downloaded the Google Earth for Mac client and ramped it up on my MacBook Pro. Two words came to mind: shock and awe. The ability to go anywhere on Earth and drill down to street level in any town I had ever lived in, see the actual structure I lived in, and bring back a flood of memories of my geospatial existence connects neurons in a fascinating way. The other experience I can think of that rattles my neurons that dramatically for me is attending the symphony. I had better be careful because I can feel an addiction coming on.

The idea that anyone on the planet can be modeling any structure on the planet at any time and then uploading that structure into Google Earth is a siren call to be there indefinitely. The fact that the Mac community has access to the process from creation to visualization magnifies the feeling two or three-fold. Through opening up the process to Mac users, we attract a whole other culture to the possibilities of virtual cities. Now, if we can attract all the cultures of the world and evolve the platform to show historical context to our impact on the planet, we will have a very powerful shared story that can't help but bring us together by shared understanding and a sense of accomplishment. The impact of our joint actions will be expressed more tangibly.

Dreams and Reality

The Digital Visualization Group at UNC-Charlotte does a nice job of capturing the technological needs of a Virtual Cities framework in their Virtual Geographic Information System project. Of course, we need access to all that data that makes a virtual city possible. The virtual terrain project does a nice job of capturing the essence of what I've been seeing within the sciences the last eight years:

The impediments to data openness can be summarized by the human failings that cause them: Greed, Ignorance, Short-sightedness, and Fear.

Greed - Greed can be a issue, especially in countries where quasi-governmental groups operate without public accountability. Instead of treating geodata as a public resource, it is hoarded by organizations that exists as monopolies, bilking the public again and again for data that the public has already paid for.

Ignorance and Short-sightedness - Many governments are largely oblivious to the benefits of a publicly available geospatial infrastructure. They are often stuck in modes of thinking that are decades or centuries out of date, with no awareness of their own country's geospatial industry, or the myriad benefits of open geodata for education, planning, and countless potential future uses.

Fear - In many countries, the government allows mapping to be controlled by the military, which often treats every single bit of geodata as a potential secret that must be kept from that country's enemies - every road, building, and tree! Since 2001/9/11, this attitude has also crept into parts of the US government, with a handful of datasets pulled from the public in the name of "fighting terrorism", although most of these fears have since been shown to be baseless. The vast majority of geodata is useless to "terrorists", while being of immense value to the public.

Thoughts to Ponder on Architecture

As of today, Wikipedia contains an entry on Christopher Alexander which states: 'Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could, Alexander produced and validated (in collaboration with Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) a pattern language designed to empower any human being to design and build at any scale.'

Virtual cities give us all the opportunity to consider these design patterns across all structures within our community. As annotators of a virtual city, we all can index representative buildings in the virtual model and debate the design for our shared learning. As we all get smarter about design, we can get smarter about our shared community interests and promote the ideas we favor with those who design.

a site suggesting architectural design patterns

Virtual City Central

I see there is already a solid virtual city reference out there called the Virtual Terrain Project. Nice job of collecting many useful links in one place and providing a clean, organized listing of them - even one of my favorite groups of all time, the Algorithmic Botany site at the University of Calgary. Hey, Mr. P (aka Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz), thanks for being you. And, horray, water continues to be a competitive field for modelers to strut their stuff. And, a very nice comparison of different whole earth viewers that makes my limited words a few entries back obsolete.

a reminder: the vtp

Virtual Cities

OK, so creating video games is quite a popular pursuit. There are degrees for future designers, programmers, testers, reviewers, etc. Great promise for changing the way we learn. But, how do we push out a project to a community effort? Web 2.0 says the people have the power when it comes to content. I'm thinking the ultimate community project, just begging to be attempted, is the virtual city. Google Earth provides the globe for us to drop our city onto. Google provides a nice SketchUp application for beginners to quickly produce virtual buildings and other architectural structures. Could we get a whole town to quickly model all structures and have someone stitch it into a coherent whole? Certainly, the time has come, no? Twelve years have passed since the Virtual Reality Modeling Language suggested a road for us to follow in building virtual content. Planet 9 Studios has professionally built virtual cities (San Francisco and New York kicking them off). I think someone ought to attempt to get a city to model itself from the ground up, grass roots and all. Hopefully, my Virtual Cities page will promote the idea well enough to find interest out there. If we build it, they will come (right?).

planet 9 studios: home page
gasworks: gasworks

A Degree in Video Game Development?

So what should a degree in video game development look like? Well, personally, I'd like it to look more like a simulation theory degree with more science and mathematics involved. Most of the associate degrees out there promote computer science skills that are more about understanding how computer languages and popular software interfaces work. As the RPI Web site mentions, 'Other institutions offering classes in video game studies include Princeton, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine. There are also specialized schools, like DigiPen in Redmond, Washington, that teach nothing but game design'.

Seems to me courses on inputs (informatics and information theory), process (e.g. artificial intelligence, data assimilation, kinematics), and outputs (e.g. artistic rendering, data presentation, architecture) could expand to include a wealth of topics that have overlap with the general background education a liberal arts student would want to gain during undergraduate study. Seems using the computer as the center of course deliverables focus would be pretty interesting. We've been using paper as the focus for long enough. Just think more expansive on this theme of computer as learning delivery vehicle and then consider the potential of simulating those phenomena you learn in math and science (alongside the skills gained by requiring the deliverables be explained in clear wording) in order to prove to others you understand them. The degree then becomes more about creating an interactive cyberspace (hopefully with modular pieces) than creating a single video game using the popular methods of today.

keiser college: video game degree

Nine Years Later

Of course, yesterday I should have mentioned the heroic efforts of certain forebearers. The code bases whipped together to connect people worldwide in 3-D cyberspace were a blast to participate with. If only that same heroic effort could be applied to today's open source design patterns in our realm.

One seventh entry link:

digitalspace traveler: home page

Open Source Integration

After paying $19 a year to participate in a cyberspace building community experiment that took off in a nice critical-mass curve, I decided I'd wait for an open source graphics-engine to be incorporated into a platform I could help extend in a similar manner. Seems there is a common pattern out there for properly integrating other open source components into a scene-graph based graphics engine.

If only we could move ahead and get academic departments all over the world working on the same grand vision. We'd not only have a platform for connecting in cyberspace, we'd have a place to try out interesting algorithms, play interesting games, interact with interesting data, and do some important research as to how these cyberspace platforms could be used more effectively. Seems Rensselaer Polytechnic is building a video games major (I read it in the alumni magazine). Certainly part of such a degree should be spent developing the underlying environment on which games can be rolled out en masse. Who else is going to follow suit? How long is it going to take to get this going (and having the different students from different universities participate in one massive project?

Some sixth entry links:

activeworlds: home page
digital spaces: home page
ogre: home page
cegui: home page
openal: home page

Whole Earth Interfaces

After paying $79 for a whole earth interface application four years ago and forking over $49 a year later and $39 the year after that, I finally downloaded Google Earth for free and kicked my paying habit. Such a nice raging debate over whether the world will pay more attention to critical whole Earth system data sets now that they can map data visually to an interactive earth accessible over the Web.

The pale blue dot syndrome, as Carl Sagan calls it, comes to your home PC. Just look how vulnerable our sweet little planet looks floating out there all by its lonesome. Of course, the world disappears under the ocean on 2/3 of the surface. That's silly, eh? Ocean data sets will turn out to be the real important ones as they become more and more available. El Nino. La Nina. Driving forces that make winners and losers of communities on land. Thankfully, we have two competing products already. One starting with scientific data and the other with more recognizable data (aerial photography of city flyovers). How excellent they've covered all of Indiana! Now, if only you could launch other applications from these planetary starting points. Hmmmmmm. Now there's a lot of potential in *that*, for sure.

Some fifth entry links:

nasa world wind earth viewer
google earth: home page
microsoft's: attempt

Grid-Enablement Software

Three days in San Diego attending a Globus 4 Toolkit Tutorial and Workshop got me thinking more about the potential of grid commuting emerging on the scene sooner rather than later. Sure, I've run a few multi-participant sessions on the Access Grid to attend conferences or connect with lab collaborators, but I hadn't thought much about how a certificate-based access point might be my key to the all the worlds computers some day. We've been developing some SOAP-based Web services to connect disparate systems by binding to various programming languages. We've been using WSDL and WSDD to identify and deploy them. But, I hadn't thought through how every programming task on every computer in the world could be accessed through a unified front based on those specifications. Nor did I expect the Globus 4 Toolkit to be based on such underlying components.

No doubt sitting at command central of such a grid-enabled empire could be quite a rush. What a potential for visualization... virtual communities, virtual organizations, virtual identities, load balancing statistics, and job control procedures lighting up one step then the next. No wonder why so much of the workshop revolved around security methods for protecting one's assets while connecting them for others to use. Some fourth entry links:

globus 4 toolkit: news page
access grid: home page
soap primer: version 1.2
wsdl:web services description language
wsdd:web services deployment descriptor

Visualization Toolkits

After attending PyCon 2005, the Python Convention, I became convinced that the Python community was worthy of supporting, just as I had given my heart and soul to the VRML and Java 3D communities in years past. I realized that the VRML community was a little too .com bulge for me (one too many extravagant parties instead of putting energy into making VRML successful on the Web). I felt like I was part of a great Java 3D community, but I then realized it was because I had access to the first alpha release and was only one of fifteen or so people really kicking the tires on a mission-critical project. The community was small and very easy to work with. But, alas, the project manager at Sun wasn't too interested in the community or the casual home user. Java 3D was all about middleware for high-performance computers that would crunch polygon integration for visualization of millions of polygon data sets worth megabucks to Sun in potential revenues. Fair enough, but a lost opportunity. I see there is finally an organized community around Java 3D but I don't get that passionate feeling of making a difference on the Web through the use of it. Enter the Visualization Toolkit. Python-wrapped and ready to be driven by all the well used Web protocols. Time to dive in and see what that means regarding Web integration potential. Some second entry links:

vtk site: vtk

pycon 2005 site: pycon talks

web 3D site: vrml`s evolution

java 3D community site: java.net

So this is blogging?

After setting up blogware twice before, I finally decided to bite the bullet, get myself my own domain, and set up the blog link off the home page front and center. I'll be blogging about things that are related to my dissertation such as the process and utility of generating scientific visualizations for consumption on the Web. Supposedly, up to seventy-some percent of brain activity is focused on processing the photons of light that enter our eyes. Seems there is an opportunity to make that a better experience than staring at a blank wall or reading the same forty or so keyboard characters over and over and over. Not that reading isn't the coolest opportunity afforded our brains since we get to invent our own imagery to connect to the words we read, but there is an opportunity to investigate certain phenomena more literally through our visual cortex and hopefully inspire us with experiences we aren't apt to run into in our daily existence. Photography is wonderful and I am sure some blog entries will be about a cool photo I've come across on the Web. But, I am more interested in seeing stuff that is abstract and yet inspired by nature. Supposedly, we need tools to help us experience those beauties. Visualization toolkits, for example. I hope to tie together some thoughts I've been having in a way that others might just want to follow along. Hence the blog. Some first entry links:

a daily: Earth Science Picture of the Day

another daily: Astronomy Picture of the Day

a book: Mapping the Next Millenium