Oscar time is here and several news sources have stories about vacationing in your favorite movie setting. The Telegraph UK article “Oscars 2010: film location holidays” explores locations of this year’s Oscar-nominated films such as Avatar,District 9, Precious, and Crazy Heart. Film induced tourism is a growing tourism draw according to books such as “Film-induced Tourism (Aspects of Tourism)”. Many tourism bureaus now have film tourism locations on their websites such as Scotland (Harry Potter, Chariots of Fire), Vancouver Island’s flash map of locations, and New York City’s wonderful “Scenes from the City“.

Yes, that’s right, 137 years of awesome issues of Popular Science magazine are now available online by searching the archive at the PopSci website. If you’re a science or gadget nerd, you’ll have lots of fun checking out the science frontiers of decades gone by, and even checking out the advertising and graphics styles for the original issues.

About the only drawback is that you have to enter a search term to get into the archives, as there is no browse function available so far. However, once you’ve searched on a term, such as “rocket pack”, you can browse around through the whole issue using the archive viewer’s navigation.

Via Wired

There was a press release back in late February that I just came across from the folks at Leica Geosystems which caught my attention, partially due to the product, partially for the picture. The product is their new Zeno handheld GPS/GLONASS device. It is a Windows CE device, as has become the norm, and they have rolled out their new Zeno Office that includes an OEM version of ArcPad 8 for the device and a desktop client extension for ArcGIS to get your data in and out of the device.

The hardware has most of the features you expect now-a-days: 2 MP camera, 640×480 3.5 inch screen, and SD and CF card slots for expansion. The Zeno 10 includes a numeric pad while the Zeno 15 adds a QWERTY keypad, which brings us to the picture of a GPS unit that immediately made me think ‘green fish’. My mental image aside, the new Zeno line looks like a great option for those in the market for a professional grade handheld GPS unit. If you get a chance to play with one, let us know what you think.

I’m always a fan of projects that transform decaying manmade structures and features into revitalized green spaces, and I saw this great example from Seoul, Korea. This project is even cooler because a river that runs directly through Seoul had been buried years before underneath the highway, and when the road was demolished for the park, the river was recovered and is now a centerpiece of the urban park.

As more and more of us are living in urban environments, I hope that we’ll see more innovative projects like
the Seoul Cheonggyecheon Stream park.

Via Eyebeam and Inhabit

Spring is a great time to start a new hobby or practice a very old one – walking. A Telegraph UK’s article on old-fashioned map reading skills discusses orienteering versus GPS. The U.S. Orienteering Federation calls orienteering the sport of a lifetime because it is both challenging and a lifetime sport. They believe it isn’t just a Scouting Merit Badge but should be an Olympic sport. There is even an internationally active Facebook page called “Orienteering should be Olympic“. According to an interview in Ultimate Orienteering “World Games is a unique opportunity to show our great sport to a big international crowd. I really think orienteering is a sport for the Olympics and by participating in the World Games I do my part in getting orienteering into the Olympic Games.” While it didn’t make it into the 2012 Olympics in London, maybe it will be in the 2014 games in Sochi.

A VerySpatial Podcast

Shownotes – Episode 241
February 28, 2010

Main Topic: Our conversation about time and remote sensing

Click for the detailed shownotes

[more...]

Nowadays, when we think about research into 3D interfaces, it’s usually referring to work done on trying to get real objects to display in 3D in a computer. But check out this cool project, called Relief, created by MIT students to read digital relief data and create a physical 3D model. It uses an array of 120 motorized with a malleable surface covering them. The pins heights are set based on relief data, and then surface is deformed accordingly. An image of terrain or other types of media can then be projected onto the surface to enhance the visualization.

TEI 2010 / Relief: a responsive 3D surface from benny on Vimeo.

Via eyebeam

This shouldn’t come as any huge shock to anyone familiar with LBS, but researchers have shown that 93% of human movement can be predicted by cell phone.  In an article published in Science, the researchers suggest that most human movement is fairly limited in area.  They actually say most customers stay in a 6 mile radius most of the time.  They go on to suggest this sort of aggregate data would be great for city planners (or cell phone companies, presumably)  The findings were broken down by hour and unsurprisingly, tended to be highly volatile during ‘transition’ times.

Ran across this interesting post: the best government blogs and why they’re the best.  With the exception of NASA, none of these have a direct geospatial tie.  In fact, all but one of them are CIO’s of their respective organizations.  It sorta makes sense it would start there, but I’d like to challenge anybody in local, state, or federal government who has any stake in geospatial information to start blogging.  The points on what makes each of these blogs work are excellent starting points to use in your own blog.  I’d love to see more geospatial government blogs out there!

Clearly conference season is upon us at the VerySpatial virtual compound as we are buying tickets for planes and trains to get to various parts of the country. With Where 2.0 kicking off on March 29 in San Jose, we wanted to point out two things.

1) Early Registration has been extended until March 1, which means you can still save 30% of the regular registration price for the next week and
2) we still have a discount code (whr10vsp) that will save you an additional 20% off the early registration price.

Also, if you are an educator, student, or work for a non-profit you can save even more (40-65%) with some of the other discount codes. If you are an undergrad or a grad student you should check with your Dean’s office to see if there are any travel monies that could cover your trip, especially if you are already on the west coast.

As for our plans, Sue and I will be making the trip out to San Jose to learn about the technologies and ideas we will be sharing in the classroom next year (or even later this semester). But as we go, so goes the microphone and recorder (not the woodwind) so send us an email if you would like to talk while we are in town. We will be in sessions, but we always make time to talk to folks about any of the great projects that are being highlighted at Where 2.0.