VirtualGeography - the newsletter

VizMAP had another good quarter with repeat business for the Queensland State Government, Praetorian, the Iron Boomerang and the Cadia Valley Minesite (see A Recent Outing, later).

Also, I was lucky enough to have the Australian GIS magazine Position publish my article entitled "The 3D Industry" in which I detail the rise of 3D geospatial stuff over the past few years. It's been an interesting ride.

If you didn't already know, VirtualGeography is a collection of interesting snippets from all over the shop, dealing with industry issues concerning the computer based visualisation of geography and a few other associated (or otherwise) interesting bits and pieces. You are receiving this either because you subscribed to VirtualGeography or you have had recent dealings with VizMAP Pty Ltd. If you do not wish to receive further instalments of VirtualGeography, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this e-mail. 

A new VirtualGeography is pushed out every now and then when we've collated enough interesting bits and pieces, which shouldn't be too big a drain on your mailbox if you're not already subscribed (of course it won't be a drain on your mailbox if you ARE subscribed, either ). The regularity of the distribution may vary depending on what else is going on at VizMAP at the time. If you know of anyone who might like to get VirtualGeography, feel free to forward this to them and ask them to subscribe. By the way, subscription and unsubscription details are at the bottom (click here).

So, g'day to all you enthusiasts requiring to visualise and simulate both urban and rural geographic information (GIS), cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, digital elevation modelling (DEM) and general mapping.

By the spelling of "Visualisation" you may have already guessed that we're not US based - that's a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. This comes to you from Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia, where it's beautiful one day and perfect the next. As a postscript to that, you can have a look at the Mooloolaba beach, now, 800m from where I sit as I write this, here.

The link between visualisation and mapping may seem a little esoteric if this is your first encounter with this sort of stuff, but let me tell you, the bond is significant... but enough of that: on with the show... I hope you like it. Any feedback you might have is highly appreciated. E-mail me here to make your comments. Enjoy... Graeme Brooke VizMAP Pty Ltd

P.S. You'll need an active internet connection to view any images that are in the content. We've done it this way to keep the size of the e-mail to a minimum.

The Virtual Earth Platform enables businesses to easily and cost-effectively customize unique location experiences for end customers. By providing multiple tools and greater control to change the way location solutions can be developed, businesses can continuously provide and update their online experience to ensure they remain competitive. Add bird's eye or 3D imagery to real estate applications to show prospective clients, enhance your store locator with the dynamic, drag-n-drop maps, or provide your fleet drivers with highly-visual driving directions. The possibilities are endless. 

Although this new form of insulation is commonly referred to as "airgaps", the gaps are really airless vacuum. Scientist see vacuum as the ultimate antidote for what is known as wiring capacitance. That occurs when two conductors, in this case adjacent wires on a chip, siphon electrical energy from one another, generating heat and slowing the data as it moves through a chip.

IBM's patented technique uses a mix of special compounds to form a vacuum between the miles of copper wires on a chip.

"This is the first time anyone has proven the ability to synthesize mass quantities of these self-assembled polymers and integrate them into an existing manufacturing process with great yield results," said Dan Edelstein, IBM Fellow and chief scientist of the self- assembly airgap project. "By moving self assembly from the lab to the fab, we are able to make chips that are smaller, faster and consume less power than existing materials and design architectures allow."

The TerraTools appearance editor, TAEdit, has been updated to support automatic mapping of common source data attribution to the OneSAF environmental data model (EDM). These mappings are fully extensible by the user using TAEdit. 

In addition to OTF terrain export, TerraTools 3.0 supports the generation of correlated export of SEDRIS 4.0 transmittals, OpenFlight® 16.0 (with MetaFlight^TM), and Tiled Scene Graph (TSG) in native OTF geodetic format. 

TerraTools 3.0 has already been used to create sample terrains for the OneSAF Objective System Version 1.0, including 4 cell Fort Hood, JRTC, and 4 cell JNTC. In addition, supplemental databases created using TerraSim's OTF export plug-in include Mosul, Iraq, and 14 cell JNTC. 

By leveraging TerraTools's industry leading capabilities in large scale urban database construction, OneSAF users can populate their databases with efficiently organized, highly detailed, and geospecific urban content while keeping the resulting terrain and database complexity within the OneSAF runtime requirements.

Click on these small resampled images to view the full screen images from the VizMAP website. Bear in mind that these are just screen dumps from a dynamic, interactive, 3D "flythrough".

If you would like more information on this project, or need your own similar project performed, let VizMAP know

IBM today is opening a virtual business center at Second Life that will be staffed by IBM sales representatives from around the world. 

Clients who want to buy hardware, software or services, or get help solving a business problem, can meet with a sales rep in the new IBM Business Center, which can be accessed here after 1 p.m. Eastern time today. 

"The IBM sales avatar [in Second Life] can work with the client avatar up to the point of signing contracts and the passing of money or credit information. That would be handled through a link to IBM's Web site or by phone," IBM says in a press release. 

"We seek to engage with clients in the way they prefer to engage," Lee Dierdorff, vice president of Web strategy and enablement for IBM, said in a conference call this morning. "This may be over the Web, this may be over the telephone, and now it may be over a 3-D virtual world."
 

• DirectionsMag Events 
• GISCafe Upcoming Events  
• Geoinformatics Calendar 
• ISPRS Events Calendar 
• National Centre for Simulation Calendar of Events 
• Position Magazine Calendar of Events 

After 18 years, the son is now old enough for his first drink. Dad takes him to the bar, tearfully tells the son he is proud of him and orders up the biggest, strongest drink for his boy. With all the bar patrons looking on curiously and the bartender shaking his head in disbelief, the boy takes his first sip of alcohol.

Swoooosh! Plop!! A torso pops out! The bar is dead silent; then bursts into whoops of joy. The father, shocked, begs his son to drink again. The patrons chant "Take another drink !"

The bartender continues to shake his head in dismay. Swoooosh! Plip! Plop!! Two arms pop out.

The bar goes wild. The father, crying and wailing, begs his son to drink again. The patrons chant, "Take another drink! Take another drink!!" The bartender ignores the whole affair and goes back to polishing glasses, shaking his head, clearly unimpressed by the amazing scenes.

By now the boy is getting tipsy, but with his new hands he reaches down, grabs his drink and guzzles the last of it. Plop! Plip!! Two legs pop out.

The bar is in chaos.

The father falls to his knees and tearfully thanks God. The boy stands up on his new legs and stumbles to the left then staggers to the right through the front door, into the street, where a truck runs over him and kills him instantly, the bar falls silent.

The father moans in grief. The bartender sighs and says, "He should have quit while he was a head!"