UGO: July 2007 Archives

UGO Tour Of Amsterdam

July 24, 2007 (20:29 CET)

The city of Amsterdam is offering its Google Earth representation up for improvement. Here is a .kmz file with a UGO vis of the highlights tour they currently offer at Amsterdam3D, including the extruded and non-extruded UGO and the original tour courtesy of Amsterdam Geo en Vastgoedinformatie (I guess...).

UGO @ night

July 24, 2007 (17:41 CET)

A couple of screendumps using the Earth city lights overlay in the new NASA layer in Google Earth. This layer is hidden inside the Featured Content layer (I lost the original .kmz file. Seems this was one of the tests using a networklink on the mac side, where, due to a bug, it updates 15 times a second, giving a nicely smooth UGO. Can't use it (yet) for the app though cause it would quickly overload the server)

UGO point2point

July 24, 2007 (15:46 CET)

The original UGO idea of visualising people's virtual travels in Google Earth (earlier post) is still intruiging me. Its for example quite instructive to see a visualisation of a GE-provided flightpath (Google Earth Orbit?) when flying from say Amsterdam to Tokyo. See this .kmz file for a visualisation of a tour around the world using such virtual point2point travel.

Point2point travel in the real world is considered one of the holy grails of suborbital spaceflight, so it seems only natural that we get used to this type of travel through a virtual interface like Google Earth before we eventually hop on a suborbital Virgin Galactic 1-hour flight from Amsterdam to Tokyo. The actual flightpath of the Virgin Galactic craft of course does not have to resemble the GE-provided flightpath cause the latter is not bound by physics. Would be interesting to do a comparison to see what the GE camera algorithms are based on.

Doing a Google on point2point, I happen to stumble on a new prize announced just a few weeks ago, the v-prize, for a Virginia2Europe point2point hypersonic suborbital spaceflight ;)

UGO work in progress

July 24, 2007 (15:12 CET)

Its been a while since I last reported in. Early July, I spent a full weekend working out a way to make the app give its position back to the user in realtime. That's more or less resolved now. Returning to my original python scripts, I came to understand that what I was making is basically a work-around for the GE-native networklink. The networklink feature was my first hunch back in May but pretty soon I found there are still some bugs with the update speed using such a networklink. That's one of the reasons I digressed to c# and a stand-alone GUI. During the weekend, I brought the python scripts back to life with C# simply sending over the GE data given through the API. With the python scripts back in place as cgi scripts on the server, I finally had the pleasure of simultaneously chasing a friend around Google's Earth late that Sunday evening.

From there, I have been playing with the app, looking at intuitive ways to use it. Later in the week, my ~~old~~ former collegue Jurryt Pietersma from NLR joined me in further developing the UGO idea. This is currently still ongoing. We'll be back with more...I've also yesterday got access to a new domain www.usergeneratedorbit.com. Its probably not gonna be the eventual name, but for now its a good ref.

Creating an installer for UGO

July 5, 2007 (01:48 CET)

Talking with David Massa, a product manager over at AGI who stumbled on my UGO blog, I find out c# doesn't give as quick a build as Delphi did. Given that STK is one of the original inspirations for UGO, I am happy to send over a draft UGO build, so I am just figuring out how VisualStudio will actually allow me to do that. Think I figured it out, just needs a quick 'to-be-sure' test tomorrow. Below is a quick throw-up of a couple of UGOs to test the VSsolution-build after installing. Btw, looking forward to that AGI blog David! (.kml file).

UGO

User Generated Orbit

July 2007 Archives