KML 3D Buildings in Los Angeles

I thought I would make the buildings I extracted for the 3D City Construction webinar last week available - you can now download them from here.

I'll talk about the tools used to create these another day, but this allows you to take a look at a photogrammetrically-derived quick and dirty city model. It doesn't have all the buildings and they're not all perfect, but it does give you an idea of what's possible. These took me about 8 hours to extract - using anaglyph-mode on my laptop (perhaps less time, I didn't time myself). It would be more efficient to use a proper stereo viewing environment but a laptop works fine for smaller jobs.

Note that if you open the file in Google Earth they'll have the floating effect described here on Thursday... So if you want to follow the workflow described in that post you can grab the terrain from here: both the IMG grid and the RRD pyramid layer.

LPS 9.3 Preview: KML Export

We're getting late in the release cycle for the upcoming LPS 9.3 release (the beta testing phase has now started!) so I thought I'd start previewing some of the new functionality we're releasing.

An increasing number of geospatial applications are supporting KML (although the word "support" can mean a lot of things), so mentioning that we'll be able to export the LPS Block File as a KML file isn't earth-shattering news. However, KML in the context of photogrammetric applications is relatively new and there are some interesting implications.

First I'll show how the exporter works and then get into what some of the uses are. Here's a screen capture of a small photogrammetric project in the LPS Project Manager, in area of Waldkirch, Switzerland.As you can see it is a relatively "complete" project. There are triangulated images, GCPs and Tie Points, some DTMs, and orthophotos. From the Project Manager, we have a new drop down entry in the "Tools" section called "Export to KML". Click on this and the following dialog appears.The dialog allows you to choose which elements of the photogrammetric project (Block File) you would like to export. Check the various boxes and then you can hit the "Export" button to generate the KML file.

For this dataset I've uploaded the output KML file here. Feel free to download it and check it out. Note that the various photogrammetric data elements (e.g. Ground Control Points) can be turned on and off. Here is a screen capture of the file in Google Earth.
So this brings us to the question, why is this relevant? The first thing that comes to mind is project tracking and status reporting. Photogrammetric/mapping projects are increasingly completed in disparate geographic areas. This can make project tracking a challenge. While there's a mixed-bag of current approaches to project tracking, a KML file can provide a relatively compact (especially if you leave out the tie points) and visual representation of what parts of the project are complete. For example, an organization with an office in the USA that is working with a partner in another part of the world could request daily updates of status for a large digital ortho project. By looking at the "orthos" layer, the project coordinator could not only see how many are complete (like they may currently do with MS Excel or other spreadsheet apps) but also see a visual of the completed project areas. Thus, they could see if the "challenging" parts of the project had been tackled yet (e.g. rugged terrain or urban areas) and manage accordingly.

I'll talk about this a bit more in future posts, as well as hightlight some of the other solutions we've been working on this year. We're certainly looking forward to getting the new release out!

China Earthquake Aerial Photography

There has been extensive media coverage of the recent earthquake in China. This was a major event: a magnitude 7.9 quake that did some serious damage. I noticed yesterday that Newsweek released created an interactive page showing some aerial shots of the damage. The images of Yingxiu and Dujiangyan show how the areas around the epicenter were absolutely flattened.

Here is a link to the USGS details page on the event. The "Maps" tab has several types of maps available, including a KML file of recent earthquake activity (in Google Earth below). It will be interesting to see if other geospatial datasets are made available of the disaster area in time - I would think there is a lot of aerial reconnaissance going on...

Heading to Portland, Whereyougonnabe?

Later today I'll be traveling to Portland for the annual ASPRS Conference. The theme of the conference, "Bridging the Horizons - New Frontiers in Geospatial Collaboration", got me thinking about the new (beta) Facebook application called Whereyougonnabe? from Peter Batty and co at Spatial Networking. Whereyougonnabe is a service that allows you to enter in the "where and when" of upcoming trips and activities. The application then lets you know which of your friends will be close to you, making it handy for all kinds of reasons. This sheds some light on the company name: spatial instead of social in "Spatial Networking". I had a chance to play around with it a bit recently and was particularly impressed with the Google Earth support. The application allows you to click on a link that generates a KML file that you can use to fire up Google Earth (and other KML-supporting apps) and view your (and your friend's) trip pathes. See the screenshot below for my trip to Portland:


Not only is your path displayed, but it also has a timeline control. It also generates an icon out of your profile picture, which is useful as well.

Back to ASPRS: I will write some updates throughout the week, but if you happen to be going think about stopping by our UGM tomorrow morning, or come by the booth anytime! We'll be giving out some new ERDAS t-shirts and will also be have a draw for an Iphone between 3 and 4pm on Wednesday.