vol 2 num 6


from VizMAP – letting you see where you stand…

Volume 2 – Number 6 
Contents

About VizMAP

VizMAP Pty Ltd, is a leading supplier of terrain Visualisation and related services to the defence, GIS, environmental, mapping, mining and exploration industries, engineering and construction firms, developers and planners, as well as government administration departments dealing with land, transportation and the environment. 

VizMAP‘s products are designed to be run on reasonably to highly configured graphics computers (PC, Linux and Unix) for public display, group training, mission rehearsal, environmental monitoring, etc. and to enhance management decision making. 

VizMAP is headquartered on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast (Australia) with affiliation in Asia, Europe, Africa and the USA and thereby provides support and services to customers worldwide. 

If you need to visualise anything geographic, e-mail VizMAP here with the details. 

For more information about VizMAP visit the VizMAP Web site at http://www.vizmap.com.au.

VirtualGeography
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A Moment’s Notice
"My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3.00 a can. That’s almost $21.00 in dog money." — Joe Weinstein 
This is funny too ;-)

VirtualGeography – the newsletter

G’Day… and Welcome to VirtualGeography
from VizMAP
Welcome to free VirtualGeography from VizMAP Pty Ltd. 

I have to apologise again that this one is a little late but I’m still currently on a Land Administration assignment in the Solomon Islands and my available time after hours to prepare the VG limited. 

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 about once per month, towards the end of the month, 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 This is funny ;-)). 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.

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 hereto 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.

 
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The Industry’s Two Cents Worth…

Space Imaging Reacts to New White House Remote-Sensing Policy
from Space Imaging
Space Imaging reacted today to the President’s newly released White House policy titled U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Space Policy (http://www.ostp.gov/html/new.html). The policy concerns the commercial remote sensing industry and the (US) government’s commitment to it. The Bush Administration’s new directive, under interagency review for a year, was announced by the White House on May 13, 2003. The directive strengthens the government’s long-term objective to establish domestic high-resolution satellite imagery companies as world industry leaders and states that it is in the national security interest to have a strong and competitive commercial remote sensing industry anchored on U.S. shores.

Delivering a keynote address at a U.S. Government-sponsored conference on commercial remote sensing in Washington, D.C. today, Secretary of Commerce Don Evans said, “The remote sensing industry is poised for great market penetration. At our department, we recognize the promise of the remote sensing industry.” During Operation Iraqi Freedom the industry “provided timely and accurate information.” said Secretary Evans.

Read that full story here
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Hardcore Stuff (hardware bits)…

The Future of 3D Graphics 
from ExtremeTech
David Kirk is one of the brightest and most influential graphics architects in the world, and as last year’s recipient of Siggraph’s annual Computer Graphics Achievement Award, he stands among such graphics luminaries as Jim Blinn, Alvy Ray Smith, Kurt Akeley, and John Warnock. In fact, many of the world’s leading graphics architects now work for Dave either full-time or part-time at Nvidia. So when David Kirk speaks about the future of graphics, people listen. Unfortunately, Microsoft forgot to list Dave’s session in the main WinHEC conference "agenda-at-a-glance" handouts, which most attendees refer, and therefore only about 30 people attended the session in a room capable of holding about 250 people, that would otherwise have been packed. 

To begin, Kirk mentioned that looking 10 years out is a long time in the graphics business, and he reflected back 10 years to the Silicon Graphics Reality Engine just emerging, and Nvidia just starting up. Looking back another 10 years to 1983, 3D graphics was in its infancy– Silicon Graphics was just created, and there were no PC graphical interfaces or operating systems (though the original Apple Macintosh would soon surface in January 1984). 

Kirk rhetorically asked if we’ll be able to continue to pace of innovation in graphics over the next 10 years, similar to what we’ve seen in the past 10-15 years, where graphics performance has increased greater than a factor of two every year. Such growth rate is faster than the rate specified by Moore’s Law, where CPU processing power and/or transistor density doubles every 18 months on average. It turns out that actual silicon technology improves at a faster rate than Moore’s Law. When you account for both shrinking transistor size and faster switching speeds, you get more than 2X improvement in just under one year per Kirk. GPUs also accelerate in processing power faster than CPUs, because graphics is an "embarrassingly parallel" problem with a lot of stream processing, and there’s always as much work to be done as you can build processing power to handle it. As long as graphics chip architectures aren’t somehow hobbled, preventing access to the parallelism, or hiding it, Kirk estimates the same 2X per year performance growth rate can continue for the foreseeable future. 

Read that full story here
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Softcore Stuff (software and data bits)…

TGS, Inc. Releases Open Inventor 4.0 
from VRSource
TGS, Inc. is proud to announce the availability of its Version 4.0 of Open Inventor™. With this version of Open Inventor, TGS has taken customer-inspired enhancements and broadened both the functionality and flexibility of the Open Inventor toolkit. Open Inventor dramatically simplifies the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of scalable and interactive 3D applications and has become the de facto standard for development of cross-platform (Windows®, UNIX®, Linux®) 3D graphics applications in C++ and Java™. It is a powerful object-oriented toolkit with over 1,000 classes and an intuitive and easy-to-use programming interface that allows for rapid prototyping and development of graphics applications. 

Major enhancements in version 4.0 include: Native SoQt Library, Multi-Volume Support, Volume Geometry Nodes, Expanded Display Support, Bump Mapping Support, Improved Transparency, and much more. 

Read that full story here
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A Recent Outing…

Brisbane 
from VizMAP
VizMAP created a vis/sim database over Brisbane using DEM and orthoimagery from Brisbane City Council. 

Sample still images from the completed dynamic visualisation database are displayed here. An active internet connection is required to be able to view these scenes.

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

 If you have a need to dynamically visualise your geographic data, let VizMAP knowyour requirements…
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OK, That’s Different…

Why Geography Matters in Marketing Strategy – The Spatial Dimension to Customer Communications and Marketing 
from DirectionsMag
I am often reminded of a conversation I had many years ago with a nameless catalog manager for a major home shopping catalog back in the UK. It was in the mid-to-later 1990’s and the internet boom was just beginning. I spent some time explaining how useful geo-demographic segmentation would be in predicting the likelihood of their customers to be shopping online in the future, and as I got towards the end of my presentation he stopped me and asked; ‘What has geography got to do with the internet?’. This question surprised me on quite a few levels, but what sticks with me today is that it showed that there was a misunderstanding of the role and relevance of location in helping refine and improve the marketing communications of organizations. 

Since that time, I have seen that kind of compartmental thinking prevalent in a number of situations. It’s almost as if many business practitioners, including the direct marketers, the internet marketers and so forth do not see the part physical geographical location has to play in their business strategy. However, before I continue, I have seen many great utilizations of spatial information, so it’s not all bad, but I do believe that through the understanding of the utility of location and the application of a few simple concepts we could see noticeable improvement in performance across a wide variety of scenarios. 

What I want to do in this article is outline some reasons why spatial information and location can be highly useful in a wide number of situations. The examples I have used primarily come from the retail or business-to-consumer world, but the concepts are equally applicable to other situations. 

Read that full story here
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Whazzup Next – with 20/20 Foresight…

Stuff to look out for in June, July & August
 

Legend
Included in last issue…
Updated since last issue…
New since last issue…

This calendar of events has been collated from:

June 2003
2-3 Jun 2003  TUGIS 2003, the 16th Annual GIS Conference Baltimore, MD USA
2-5 Jun 2003  23rd EARSeL Annual Symposium "Remote Sensing in Transition"  Gent, Belgium
2-5 Jun 2003  AEC Systems 2003 Washington, USA
2-6 Jun 2003 International Symposium on Spectral Sensing Research (ISSSR 2003) ISPRS WG VII/1  Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2-6 Jun 2003 ISSRM 2004 (International Symposium of Society and Resource Management) 2004 Keystone Resort, Colorado USA
2-6 Jun 2003 EARSEL Symposium Gent, Belgium
6-7 Jun 2003 EARSeL Workshops – "Forest Fires and Coastal Zones" Gent, Belgium
3 Jun 2003 GITA Webinar… Geospatial Information: Government and Municipal Perspectives WWW
3-6 Jun 2003 ISPRS WG IV/8 Workshop "Global Environmental Databases: Adaptation to Meet Current & Future Needs"  Bangkok, Thailand
4-6 Jun 2003 ScanGIS’2003 – The 9th Scandinavian Research Conference on Geographic Information Science Espoo, Finland
5 Jun 2003 SmartTalk Events USA (internet)
5-6 Jun 2003 Emerging Technology Summit II: Spatial Web Services Vienna, Virginia USA
6-7 Jun 2003 EARSeL Workshops "Forest Fires and Coastal Zones"  Gent Belgium
6-7 Jun 2003 MapServer User Meeting St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
9-12 Jun 2003 e-Gov 2003 Washington, DC USA
9-13 Jun 2003 SGEM 2003 – Surveying, Geology and Environmental Management Albena, Bulgaria
11-12 Jun 2003 Spatial Data Analysis Training Ann Arbor, Michigan USA 
12-13 Jun 2003 FME Training Vancouver, BC, Canada
12-13 Jun 2003 Introduction to Boundary Analysis using BoundarySeer Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
15-18 Jun 2003 IST Mobile & Wireless Communications Summit 2003  Aveiro, Portugal 
17-19 Jun 2003 ISPRS Joint Workshop of WG I/3 and WG II/2: Three-Dimensional Mapping from InSAR and LIDAR  Portland, OR, USA
19-20 Jun 2003 Spatial Futures 2003 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
19-20 Jun 2003 Status of GIS in NSW 2003 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
23-23 Jun 2003 GeoTech 2003 Copper Mountain, Colorado USA
23-26 Jun 2003 The 2003 International Conference on Machine Learning;Models, Technologies and Applications (MLMTA) Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
24-25 Jun 2003 Pennsylvania GIS Conference 2003  Harrisburg, PA USA
24-27 Jun 2003 Space 2003-NavSat 2003 CHINA Geneva, Switzerland
24-25 Jun 2003 11th Annual Pennsylvania GIS Conference  Harrisburg, PA USA
25-26 Jun 2003  2003 GenaWare Annual Symposium  Durham, NC USA
25-27 Jun 2003  The 11th International Conference on Geoinformatics’ 2003: Advanced Geoinformatics – Linking Pacific Rims to the World  Toronto, Canada
26-27 Jun 2003  Web-Enabled GIS Technologies Forum Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
27 Jun 2003  Cumberland Group of Surveyors’ Development Seminar Warwick Farm, NSW, Australia
27-29 Jun 2003 ISPRS WG VII/4 4th International Symposium "REMOTE SENSING OF URBAN AREAS 2003"  Regensburg, Germany
30 Jun – 11 Jul 2003 23rd IUGG General Assembly "IUGG 2003" Sapporo, Japan
July 2003
1-3 July 6-9, 2003 ISPRS Workshop ‘Vision Techniques for Digital Architectural and Archaeological Archives’ Ancona, Italy
2-4 July, 2003 AGIT 2003 – 15th Symposium and Exposition for Applied Geoinformatics Salzburg, Austria
July 6-9, 2003 ESRI Education User Conference San Diego, California, USA
July, 7-8, 2003 Coastal GIS 2003: an integrated approach to Australian coastal issues Wollongong, NSW, Australia
July 7-11, 2003 International ESRI User Conference San Diego, California, USA
July 7-14, 2003 Tech Ed 9th Annual Summer Camp  Bedford, New Hampshire
July 9-11, 2003 ISPRS WG II/3, IV/2 and IV/4 Joint Workshop on Advances in Spatial Data Infrastructures & Database Interoperability Southampton, UK
July 10-11, 2003 ISEIS 2003 Annual Conference on Systems Science and Information Technology for Environmental Applications Regina, CANADA
July 10-11, 2003 Avenza Systems Training San Diego, CA USA
July 10-12, 2003 Association of Surveyors of Papua New Guinea Conference Port Moresby, PNG
July 13-17, 2003 Coastal Zone 2003 Baltimore, Maryland, USA
July 13-17, 2003 Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2003 Annual Meeting Portland, Oregon, USA
July 13-19, 2003 SVG Open 2003 Vancouver, Canada
July 16-18, 2003 MultiTemp-2003: Seconde International Workshop on the Analysis of Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images Ispra (VA), Italy
July 16-18, 2003 ISPRS WG III/2 & III/8 Workshop – "From surface reconstruction to 3D scene analysis in digital imagery: theory, applications and evaluation" Paris, FRANCE
July 17-19, 2003 Map Asia 2003 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
July 17-19, 2003 Laser-Scan User Group 2003 Conference Cambridge, UK
July 20-22, 2003 2nd Annual PPGIS Conference Portland, OR USA
July 20-23, 2003 URISA 2nd Annual Public Participation GIS Conference (PPGIS) Portland State University, USA
July 20-24, 2003 GML Dev Days 2003 Vancouver, BC, Canada
July 20-25, 2003 Cambridge Conference 2003 – ‘National mapping – shaping the future’ Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK
July 21-25, 2003 IEEE/IGARSS 2003 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Toulouse, France
July 22-25, 2003 SatNav 2003, the 6th Int’l Symp. On Satellite Navigation Technology Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
July 23-24, 2003 Underground Focus Live Manteno, Ill, USA
July 28-31, 2003 Accela Government Automation Conference Las Vegas, NV USA
28 July – 8 August 2003 1st International Summer School on Geographic Information Science Pratolino (Tuscany) Italy
28 July – 8 August 2003 The Vespucci Initiative – Summer School on Geographic Information Science Florence, Italy
August 2003
3 – 5 Aug 2003  Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Annual Meeting Boulder, Colorado USA
5 – 8 Aug 2003  National Collegiate CADD Conference College Park, MD, USA 
8-10 Aug 2003  ISPRS IC WG II/IV 4th Joint ICA/ISPRS/EuroGeographics Workshop on Incremental Updating and Versioning of Spatial Data Bases  Durban, South Africa
August 10 – 16 International Cartographic Conference Durban, South Africa
August 11 – 13 Arizona Geographic Information Council Education and Training Symposium 2003 Prescott, AZ USA
August 11 – 15 Advanced Spatial Analysis Workshop for Public Health Olympia, WA, USA 
12-13 August OZRI 2003 – GIS@Work (ESRI User Conference) Adelaide, South Australia
14-19 August GI in Land Management – International Summer School Szekesfehervar, Hungary
15 August The 7th annual Symposium on Precision Agricultural Research in Australasia; Adelaide; jointly organised by the Australian Centre for Precision Agriculture and the Southern Precision Agriculture Association Adelaide, South Australia
16-23 Aug  ISPRS Joint meeting and Council Meeting  Istanbul, Turkey
17 – 20 Aug  5th Annual Street Smart & Address Savvy Conference Providence, Rhode Island USA
18-20 August GITA 2003 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
18-20 August 4th Across-the-Strait Geomatics Conference  Changchun,  China
18-21 August Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping’s Annual User Group Meeting Denver, CO, USA
18-21 August Kentucky’s 2003 GIS Conference… "10 Years of Discovery" Louisville KY USA
19 – 22 August GIS BRASIL 2003 & COMDEX Brasil 2003 São Paulo, Brazil
20-22 August  MMT ‘2003 – The 4th International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology Kunming, China
24 – 27 August  3rd International Workshop: "Basement Volcanoes Interplay and Human Activities" Kamchatka, Russia
25 – 26 August  FME Training Course Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
27 August  GITA Webinar… On the Move: What’s New in Mobile Technology  WWW
29 – 30 August  4th ISPRS Workshop on Dynamic and Multi-dimensional GIS 2003 (DMGIS 2003) Enschede, 
The Netherlands
 
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A Parting Gesture…Don't take this too seriously...

The Sunday Afternoon Flight 
From Giggleville
A doctor, a lawyer, a little boy and a priest were out for a Sunday afternoon flight on a small private plane. Suddenly, the plane developed engine trouble.

In spite of the best efforts of the pilot the plane started to go down. Finally the pilot grabbed a parachute, yelled to the passengers that they had better jump, and bailed out.

Unfortunately there were only three parachutes remaining. The doctor grabbed one and said "I’m a doctor, I save lives, so I must live," and jumped out.

The lawyer then said, "I’m the smartest man in the world, I deserve to live!" He grabbed a parachute and jumped.

The priest looked at the little boy and said, "My son, I’ve lived a long and full life. You are young and have your whole life ahead of you. Take the last parachute and live in peace".

The little boy handed the parachute back to the priest and said "Not to worry, Father. The smartest man in the world just took off with my back pack."

Smile... it's free.
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…that’s all, folks! (for now).