UGO: August 2007 Archives

UGO Video 2

August 15, 2007 (19:44 CET)

A follow-up post with some additional images of UGO-created 3d objects. Below I started playing around with another randomly picked image (this one), creating 3d sculptures while flying around. They have a certain architectural feel to them if you ask me :). Btw, you can see the rudimentary GUI of UGO on the top right of some of the screendumps.

UGO Video

August 15, 2007 (18:40 CET)

Looking at ways to utilise UGO's ability to provide position feedback in Google Earth, I keep returning to a project by Berlin based ART+COM called 'The Invisible Shape of Things Past'. Some 10(!) years ago I saw a presentation of the project by Joachim Sauter. In this self-commissioned work, they developed an exceptionally beautiful way to build 3d representations of video footage in a virtual world. The first image below for example shows how they recreated a 3d video structure from a video clip shot in Berlin (be sure to check out their other images & videos).

Replacing my earlier 3d models with 'flat' 2d images, creating a 3d video object build from individual frames seems to be an interesting possible use of the UGO code. Of course there are several hurdles to overcome in order to get the right position and orientation of each individual frame, but in principle this should be feasible given the right time/attitude correlation within the video footage (not that different from photo geocoding). Below are some screendumps of tests I did a few weeks ago where I more or less picked a random image and started flying around in Google Earth.

As a side note, its at this stage unfortunately not possible to provide a .kmz file to give you a first hand view of these tests in Google Earth because sofar loading a .kmz file with multiple individual positions only loads the corresponding 3d model into the first position. I'll be looking into this.

Wagging the dog

August 15, 2007 (17:25 CET)

That's weird, I just see there have been quite some hits (relatively speaking as they're only in the 10's) on a URL ending with /blog//blog on this domain. I can't seem to figure out what the originating source is in Google Analytics. In fact, it seems the originating source is /blog//blog itself...? Anyway, I've fixed it with a proper referral in my .htaccess file.

2d UGO

August 14, 2007 (18:01 CET)

While doing a search for 'tobedetermined, Amsterdam' in Google maps, I happen to stumble upon a UGO I uploaded back in May. Its one of the first times I experience kml search at work as it was announced some time ago. Good to know how it works...

A day in the life of a UGO

August 11, 2007 (03:53 CET)

While I am figuring out how to get UGO going on the mac, I've also been playing around on the Windows side of things with the new functionality of getting a realtime visualisation of your UGO position in Google Earth (earlier post). Its still hacking away, but the experience of seeing your positions materialise "right here, right now" is quite a powerful one when it comes to the immersiveness of a platform like Google Earth (aka virtual worlds, or better, mirror worlds). Below I have included some screendumps of different configurations, using Sketchup as the tool for 3d modelling. Getting my inspiration more from Photosynth than from Second Life, my initial choice on how to represent myself was for a pyramid with the bottom plane directed towards the viewing direction. The first one shown below is one of the initial tests of the new code set next to an "old style" UGO (orientation was not yet taken into account at that time). The other ones are subsequent stages of just having fun flying around and getting a feel of the new functionality using a SpaceNavigator. And of course I couldn't resist playing around with some of the standard 3d models provided by Sketchup. I wish I could show them all here but I guess you get the picture so I've uploaded all the other stills to my Flickr UGO set. (Update 12Aug-> just noticed the settings of my Flickr account prevented the download of full-res images. I changed it into a CC license so now all sizes are available for download/sharing)

UGO on OSX: Status Update

August 6, 2007 (14:13 CET)

With summer finally catching on here in the Netherlands, I spent some time figuring out how to get UGO onto OSX. With Jurryt Pietersma now part of development, things have unmistakably become more Python-centric (not to say: Pythonic) so my aim with the Mac port is to use Python where possible.

First off: the Google Earth - Applescript API. Using OgleEarth's announcement as a starting point, it turns out to be fairly straightforward to read out Google Earth coordinates using GetViewInfo. Even better, these Applescript commands can also be called directly in Python without having to write too much Applescript code. Next: the GUI. Where I've used C# sofar to build a GUI on the PC side, Apple comes with XCode, Cocoa, Objective-C and ApplicationKit, so this will take some time to get into. Best thing to note at this point is that the PyObjC bridge will allow me to stay as close as possible to Python, using Xcode mainly as the IDE to develop the UI.

As an appetizer, this .kmz file shows the first UGO made on a Mac (see the difference? ;-)). Its generated with my original python script of 3 months ago, adapted to accommodate the Applescript API to read out the viewer's viewing coordinates. Building a OSX GUI around this script will be up next. Looking ahead, it seems the limited API functionality on the Mac side will be the main hurdle to get UGO running on OSX as we have it on Windows, but more on that later...

UGO

User Generated Orbit

August 2007 Archives