Programming/Dev





Layar Vision – Is mobile AR finally knocking on the door of relevance?

Aug 6th, 2011 | By

In the mad scramble to finish editing my PhD dissertation and graduate, I haven’t been following the latest and greatest tech in the geospatial realm as much as I should be, but I am definitely intrigued by the launch of Layar Vision. It’s an extension to the mobile augmented reality Layar platform that allows a [...]



3D Street-style Mapping with Kinect

Jan 27th, 2011 | By

Almost daily, I see a new cool and amazing hack that someone has accomplished with Microsoft’s Kinect that tops the last one. I’m hoping to try my hand at some much more modest attempts this summer related to my immersive simulation project, but I couldn’t come close to what Martin Szarski has done: 3D street [...]



Microsoft Research’s Street Slide

Jul 29th, 2010 | By

If you haven’t seen the demo of Microsoft Research’s Street Slide, it’s a pretty cool addition to Bing Streetside that is not available yet, but will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2010. While Google Streetview and Bing Streetside allow you to see photo representations of an area as you navigate through it, you’re basically limited to [...]



Microsoft Live Labs’ Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos AR features for Bing Maps

Feb 17th, 2010 | By

As you all know by now, I am a fan of Photosynth. Just a few days ago, the creator of Seadragon and co-creator of Photosynth, Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a great presentation at TED 2010 and showed a demo of some new augmented reality type features being integrated into Bing Maps, including Indoor Panoramas [...]



CrisisCamp Haiti – Saturday crisis mapping event

Jan 15th, 2010 | By

Sorry for the short notice, but I just found out about CrisisCamp Haiti, a crisis mapping volunteer event being held in multiple locations tomorrow, Saturday January 16th, which is going “to bring together volunteers to collaborate on technology projects which aim to assist in Haiti’s relief efforts by providing data, information, maps and technical assistance [...]



GeoVation Challenge and NYC’s BigApps Competition

Dec 21st, 2009 | By

A couple of great competitions for innovative ideas and applications are going on right now, the GeoVation Ideas Challenge and GeoVation Awards Programme in the UK and New York City’s BigApps Competition, and you can participate! For the GeoVation Ideas Challenge (GeoVation was founded and is currently supported by the Ordnance Survey), you simply sign [...]



UK GIS developers – Only 1 more day to enter the ESRI-Bing Maps Mashup Challenge!

Sep 17th, 2009 | By

That right – if you’re in the UK and you’re a GIS developer utilizing ESRI products, ESRI UK is sponsoring the http://www.esriuk.com/micro_sites/mashup_challenge/. All you have to do is build a GIS-based mashup utilizing Bing Maps and ESRI’s web mapping technology, and you could win an Xbox and a free seat at an ESRI UK web [...]



Lost in the Virtual Fog – A Question of Scale

Jul 7th, 2009 | By

I have been remiss in not doing any diary entries for awhile, but I have been feverishly working trying to get my demo XNA application ready for the ESRI UC presentation. Finally today, I think I got the last bit of functionality on my list working, so I am pretty excited and crossing my fingers [...]



Lost in the Virtual Fog – making the interactive connection, part 1

May 27th, 2009 | By

My dissertation proposal defense is finally over and, since I passed, it’s time to get back to work and really get the functionality on the Spatial Experience Engine ramped up. During my presentation and in the Q-and-A with my committee afterward, I kept coming back to the issue of interaction in the virtual world. I’ve [...]



Pixel City – Procedurally-generated nighttime cityscape

May 15th, 2009 | By

This cool video shows how programmer Shamus Young created a procedurally-generated 3D nighttime cityscape. The program generates everything every time it runs, and doesn’t use any pre-stored textures or art assets. He gives a great step-by-step explanation of how he did the project in a series of blog posts. Via FlowingData