Google Earth: Beirut, Haret Hreik quarter, before / after

Of all possible sources, News.com has posted a short blog entry called "Why isn't Beirut burning in Google Earth?". The answer of course is that Google Earth doesn't update their image sources all that often. But as many responses have pointed out there are ways around this, using user-added image overlays and extra data from external sources.

Some examples: Ogle Earth offers a KMZ file overlaying an image from Digital Globe showing the Haret Hreik quarter of Beirut after the recent bombardments (link). This area is considered to be a Hezbollah stronghold, and has suffered heavy damage. One Google Earth community post provides a schematic overlay showing bomb targets (link), while another post provides geolocated information about bomb and missile strikes (link).

I'm not posting this to take a political position on the conflict, though I have concerns about humanitarian law and the Israeli use of disproportionate force). But it should remind readers that GIS applications are inherently political. Maps have always been weapons, although the innocuous geotagging of Flickr pictures makes it easy to forget this fact. When Art+Com developed Terravision in the mid-90s (predating Google Earth by 10 years), they were soon approached by the US Military with a view to use it for military applications. Art+Com turned them down.

So while this should serve as a sobering reminder of the traditional uses of geolocation, it simultaneously highlights a new possibility for user-generated geoinformation resources balancing out the mass media. One of the applications proposed by Art+Com in 1995 was the distributed sharing of environmental research data. A utopian view would be that Google Earth, MSN Virtual Earth etc. could make the power of geopolitical applications available to grassroots movements.

Satellite image of Sao Paulo from Google Earth

I recently returned from a week in Sao Paulo for the opening of the excellent Art.ficial Emotion 3.0 exhibition at Itau Cultural. Following my recent Flickr addiction I documented the show in a Flickr set, a lot of which is geotagged. It's worth noting that Aemkei has released a new version of his excellent Flickr geotagging bookmarklet, which caches the previous location found and automatically adds a "see where this picture was taken" link to the photo description.

Another fun tool I've been experimenting with is Roblog's Flickrfly. It is a script which will allow you to "fly" to the location of a geotagged image in Google Earth. Just add a simple link to your image description and Flickrfly takes care of the KML file, including overlaying a thumbnail of your photo on the Google Earth map. The image above was taken in Google Earth, and if you look at the original size on Flickr you will see 4 small thumbnails indicating different images and their actual location.

Do have a look at what Sao Paulo looks like from space, it's a bit like watching cancer grow. And I liked it there.

Bonus geo links (see Toxi / TomC)

• Geotracing
• Google Earth KML specs (now in version 2.1)
• Battleship: Google Earth

Is there anyone that will go in Linz at Ars Electronica this year? Just a month is remaining and many friends of mine are still unsure if to come. If you’ll be there, please drop me a line.

Last month I received as present from my friends Limiteazero the retrospective book they just released. I was really impressed by the quality of the design of the book itself but also of the dvd included. Definitely inspiring!

And if we consider also the interesting articles about art and aesthetic written by high quality authors, this is definitely a must have book if you like artistic installations.

Luckily recently it has been available for international purchasing. So, if you are interested, you can buy it here.

Am currently uploading my video “bootleg” of a fine, little Pecha Kucha™ inspired event from Tuesday night at Westminster University. SteveC and TomC, of Open Streetmap (amongst others) fame, have managed to organize a fabulous lineup of speakers talking about everything from the political decline in the UK (not just), Extreme-Suduko cheating/hacking with handmade OCR in Ruby, livecoding music with Haskell98 (Alex, you’ve got to check out Brainfuck), Harry Potter & 3D scanning entire buildings, levels of indirection and comparing programming languages to football teams, cloning applications and the links Ning has with LambdaMOO; more about ubuntu, Rails and using constraints for your own benefit (also read here), Ghost dog, Hagakure, Braitenberg, Maeda and the general interconnectness of things, the joy of functional programming (in JavaScript), Topic maps (vs. RDF), usability testing and especially usability issues with mapping, story-driven software development, allowing user narratives to unfold online etc….

All in all there were 13 speakers and I have to say it was ++good and highly inspiring. The chosen presentation format really kept everyone’s attention focused. I was meant to be a speaker myself, but sadly had to cop-out last minute. I really hope this will become a regular event… Congrats to all involved!

The above mentioned video was recorded with my 6680. I managed to fill up the whole memory card, but only got the first ~50 mins of the event…

Despite a real slowdown of Vision Factory’s development since the beginning of the summer, I’ve taken the time to integrate ARToolkitPlus, built upon ARToolkit. Basically it is a computer vision library allowing the tracking of physical patterns with one single camera in real time. Plug a camera, print markers on papers, let the lib get their position and orientation and you’re all set to draw 3D objects on your image feed. This is nearly software plug’n’play ! I made some videos, which were directly exported from Vision Factory application itself :

• Fontain (~1.7 Mo, .mov)
• Fire (~800 Ko, .mov)
• Metaballs (~1.1 Mo, .mov)

Besides, I’ve also come up with a complete redesign of the application network architecture. Now every protocol distributing tasks for each computers through osc comes as a completely independent dynamic library for Vision Factory, whose instances can load them as simple plugins. Plug’n’play again!

This morning started with a happy surprise: Islands Of Consciousness is among the four finalists in the “Original Sound” category of the Flashforward2006 Austin Film Festival. On Islands Of Consciousness I collaborated with the Ukrainian musician and composer Oleg Marakov who’s concept of a randomly arranged soundtrack I translated into Flash and merged it with my random visual engine.

Of course we would be delighted if you give us your vote in the People’s Choice Award, though I must say that the decision is a tough one - I see Dr. Whohoo’s Color Analytics, the awesome C-64 emulator by Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers and the fantastic Comcastic site among the candidates just to name a few.

Some tweakings on the layout of this weblog. It really was at the time to do some re-design and fresh up the visual impression!

Brevity is a scripting language for a scripting language. More specifically, it's a scripting language that sits on top of ActionScript 3.0 and gives quick and simple access to oft-used AS functions. From the site:

Brevity is attempting to do for ActionScript what Processing does for Java. Indeed, Brevity is obviously borrowing from Processing already. One look at a sample script makes that much clear:

Picture by vade.info

Lately I found a very cool tutorial to make a glitch-aesthetic patch with maxMSP and Jitter. The basic design can simply applied to any other scripting language. There is also provided a link to Iman Moradi’s dissertation on Glitch Aesthetics. Really a good fundament to build upon.

The patch is somehow a simuation of Glitch Aesthetics. The true glitch is caused by errors or malfunctions. To see a real glitch, go to appropirate/dlt for glitchy delta frames.

So I have begun trying to learn chuck again.

To do it, I took alex maclean’s advice to the letter:

…my best advice when looking for inspiration is to listen to your favorite pieces of music. Listen to the structure behind a piece and think about how you might write an algorithm to create that structure…

(From Hacking perl in nightclubs)

And that’s what I came up with:

Clapping music is a piece by steve reich in which two performers repeat a simple pattern clapping their hands, with a little shifting every eight repetitions (for a better explanation see the wikipedia entry or watch a video).

The structure is so simple that I thought It would be a good starting point for a chuck exercise… And that’s what I did. Each “clapper” is on a stereo channel. The shifting occurs every 4th repetition.

See the code

Hear the result

Credits:

Score image taken from crownpoint

Claps sound taken from freesound (thanks noisecollector).

Llevo bastante tiempo pensando empezar a escribir el weblog en inglés, pero nunca acabo de decidirme. La mayoría de la web que consumo y en la que participo está en ese idioma, por lo que cada vez tiene menos sentido escribir en castellano.

Por otro lado asumo que la “selecta” audiencia de Hola, mundo, será capaz de seguirme en inglés.

En vez de seguir pensándolo, he decidido probarlo, así que el siguiente post (y probablemente los que sigan), estará en inglés. Veamos qué tal va…

Si tienen algo que decir, díganlo, que para eso están los comentarios.

Just came back from the Art.ficial Emotion 3.0 exhibition in Sao Paulo, which featured some excellent interactive works. See my Art.ficial Emotion Flickr set for documentation.

I've pretty much been on blogging holiday lately, but here's a few Processing links at least…

• Christian Riekoff has released an early version of a new PGraphics renderer called proGL, aimed at optimizing OpenGL performance by calling OpenGL directly instead of performing world transformations in Processing. See his post on the Processing forums for details.

  This should improve OpenGL performance for many applications. This project started during the EXTEND workshop in Barcelona, so I am personally especially happy to see this realized.

• Michael Chang has released a new version of his SVG importer library, called "Candy". It's a beta, again see the post on Processing forums.
• Ben has posted a new Processing status report, detailing what's going on with the project. Some API changes are in the works on the way towards 1.0 status, and they are focusing on libraries as a way of extending Processing. Ben mentions changes to the library structure, but no details. Should be interesting.