VirtualGeography - the newsletter

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We have also revamped the VizMAP flier which details the fundamentals of what VizMAP does and as a departure from the normal VirtualGeography, this is attached. Please take the time to review it and send it on to those in your contact list who may benefit from our services.

If I we don't work, we don't eat. Is that the same as you?

On a personal front, I have just given away my second daughter in marriage. That's two within six months! Luckily I only have two boys left, and they have been put on notice that I need at least two years advance notification before "the next one".

I trust 2008 has so far been equally tantalising for you.

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 technology developed under this Phase II extension will be implemented in TerraTools® and RoadMAP from TerraSim®. TerraTools is a COTS geospatial database generation system used thoughout DoD to support the generation of modeling and simulation databases for U.S. Army OneSAF TestBed, WARSIM, and OneSAF Objective System as well as correlated visual systems. It is used to generate hundreds of one degree cells for large area simulation as well as highly detailed urban environments, including building interiors and underground structures, with submeter accuracy. These databases are used for exercise development and training as well as archived for use on DoD community networks.

RoadMAP is a semi-automated road network extraction product which currently supports the analysis of panchromatic and color imagery. Integrating pan/LIDAR/MSS data under this contract will increase the level of automation of model creation for urban visualization while improving the results of feature extraction. Under this extension, TerraSim will add two additional levels of analysis to the RoadMAP process. The first, macro-level terrain analysis, uses LIDAR digital elevation model (DEM) data to aid scene interpretation, feature extraction, and visualization. Road network extraction is one example of macro-level terrain analysis. The second, micro-level terrain analysis, will fuse elevation and classification information to generate a traffickability map. Using this, coupled with the use of spatial context information, we can extract fine features, such as trees, cars, and light poles, usually found in cluttered urban environments

Wilson Harvey, senior computer vision scientist and co-principal investigator for this work explained, "We are excited to be a small part of the DARPA URGENT program and to be able to extend our current products to support LIDAR and multi-spectral processing."

Please contact sales@terrasim.com for more information on TerraSim source data preparation products or Urban Details™ database creation products.

NVIDIA’s investment complements the company’s ongoing strategy to solve some of the world’s most computationally intensive problems with its market-leading GPUs and world-class tools and software. The company has enjoyed significant success to date with its Tesla™ line of GPU computing hardware solutions and, more importantly, with CUDA™ technology, its award-winning programming environment that gives developers access to the massively parallel architecture of the GPU through the industry-standard C language.

“Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today and is the major obstacle to the continued scaling of computing performance that has fueled the computing industry, and several related industries, for the last 40 years,” says Bill Dally, chair of the computer science department at Stanford.

Until recently, computer installations delivering massive parallelism could only be deployed in large-scale computer centers with hundreds to thousands of separate computer systems. With the recent introduction of many-core processors such as the GPU and the multi-core CPU, most new computer systems come equipped with multiple processors that require new software techniques to exploit parallelism. Without new software techniques, computer scientists are concerned that rapid increases in the speed of computing could stall.

From fundamental hardware to new user-friendly programming languages that will allow developers to exploit parallelism automatically, the PPL will allow programmers to implement their algorithms in accessible, “domain-specific” languages while at deeper, more fundamental levels of software, the system would do all the work for them in optimizing the code for parallel processing.

“NVIDIA has been tackling parallel computing challenges since its founding and, as a result, the GPU has evolved into an incredibly powerful processor, capable of running thousands upon thousands of concurrent operations,” said David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA. “We applaud, and are proud to be a part of, Stanford University’s formation of the PPL and its mission to push the software industry to expose the inherent parallelism in today’s computers.” 

“If you ask someone off the street about Mexican archeology, they’ll say Aztec, Maya. Sometimes they’ll also say Inca, which is the wrong continent, but you’ll almost never hear anyone talk about the Zapotecs,” says Middleton, acting chair of the Department of Material Culture Sciences and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology. “They had the first writing system, the first state society, the first cities. And they controlled a fairly large territory at their Zenith—250 B.C. to 750 A.D.”

The process of state formation varied across the Zapotec realm. Sometimes it involved conquest, and other times it was more economically driven. Archeologists like Middleton are interested in different aspects of society that emerged in the process, such as social stratification and the development and intensification of agriculture and economic specialization.

Middleton’s study will explore how the Oaxacan economy and environment changed as the Zapotec state grew and then collapsed into smaller city-states. Funding from NASA and National Geographic will also help Middleton build a picture of how climate and vegetation patterns have changed over time.

“For the past 4,000 years, human activities have been a factor in environmental change,” Middleton says. “And there are some parts of Mesoamerica that we have pretty good evidence that the environment we see today is the catastrophic result of ancient agricultural practices.” Middleton will focus on two sites in the Chichicapam Valley located in between two of the major arms of the central valleys of Zapotec. The National Geographic-funded portion of the study began last summer when he documented important archeological sites and selected candidates for excavation.

Imagery from Earth Observing 1 and Landsat satellites obtained over three years will help Middleton identify the natural resources found at archeological sites. He will work with colleagues John Kerekes and David Messinger along with graduate student Justin Kwon in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science to analyze the large amounts of data taken at different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Their own research uses similar techniques to analyze urban landscapes, and inspired Middleton to apply the technology to archeological landscapes.

The visualisation was basically a pototexture on terrain visualisation of "what exists". This will be used for public consultation, flood mitigation modelling and planning.

The visulaisation was based on 4.6Gb of mosaiced aerial orthophotography supplied in GeoTIFF and a 5m regular cell DEM in ESRI GridASCII format. 
 

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

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

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