geobloggers

Ok, I admit, I’m a sucker for Virtual Globes. No wait, I take that back, I’m a sucker for viewing information, as it happens on virtual globes. Preferably latest photos from contacts, where people are on Dopplr (dopplr.com), News, blogposts and so on.

There are a bunch of Virtual Globes around, NASA WorldWind, ArcGIS Explorer, errr, some others and Google Earth. I happen to use Google Earth because it runs on the Mac, and because I can use the Space Navigator, which makes me feel a bit like I’m in a film or something. Look, here’s a screen shot of me using Google Earth right now, to keep track of various Flickr photos and stuff.

Great, photos on the map and all that.

Now there are two ways I view photos on the map; the ‘Subscribe to Feeds’ way and the ‘In this Area’ way.

For the ‘Subscribe to Feeds’ way I’ve got a few users, tags, and groups I like to keep track of using the KML feeds from Flickr (more about that on Monday). Just like a RSS reader it polls Flickr for updates periodically and then spins the globe round to fit all the updates into the viewport (more about that further down).

The ‘In this Area’ way, come from Panoramio, which works by Google sucking down their data on a regular basis and then making it available via Google Earth Layer. Which is great when you want to go look at a specific area. But not the what’s happened in the last hour way.

So one is area based and one recently updated thing (user/news/etc) based. Both are great ways to find stuff, serving slightly different purposes.

TwitterVision and FlickrVision are great examples of the continuous update model. 3DliveStats and Global-i are some more (I’m sure there are a more examples, please feel free to let me know).

FlickrVision

3DliveStats

(mainly because the realtime plotting of ‘shaving unwanted facial hair’ makes me giggle)

Global-i

However I have two problems.

1) Continuous updates that spin the Globe around.

This is great when there’s just one datasource, but when I’m running Google Earth with several sources all updating at different times the whole thing basically spends all it’s time jumping around from one place to another. Which to some degree sounds great, but in reality means I spend a lot of time looking at various oceans racing past with no idea what’s going on. The other option is to turn to jumping around off, but then I have no idea what’s just updated and can’t see half the globe. Having the globe slowly rotating doesn’t really help much either.

2) Actually seeing the globe anyway.

I really need a whole spare screen to run the Whatever Globe Viewer on. One of the points of the whole Snow Crash Date Globe visualization thing is that it looks cool. There’s no point having it, if it’s covered up with other windows and so on. And it seems a little odd to set aside a whole other machine dedicated showing the globe (and acting as a file server/music/tv hub … hummm actually maybe not so bad, but anyway). I’m not sure I want to set aside desktop space for it and all that.

So what’s the solution? Well clearly it’s this …

Photo by JasonJT

The ultraOrb by James N. Sears. Which was wonderfully on show at the Maker Faire this year. You can see a video of it in action here and here.

Or maybe this …

About which I have no more information, but appears to take up much less room.

Unfortunately both involve spinny things spinning very fast. And as someone who has great trouble resisting pushing bananas through the grills of oscillating fans, should I happen to find myself near one while holding said banana (don’t ask, I don’t know). I’m pretty sure actually having one would be a bad idea. Maybe one day when the technology has gotten better, the resolution has increased and they incase it in a clear multi-touch spherical cover, then I can be trusted to have one.

A less finger removing option could be the Globe4D a rather attractive device that involves projecting images from above onto a globe, which in turn acts as a giant trackball. The image projected is controlled by the trackball/globe, meaning that as you rotate the globe the image updates to reflect the movement. The 4D part comes in the form of time, with an extra input being an outer ring that moves you forwards and backwards in the forth dimension.

The advantage of this is that it can do the zooming around thing as information updates without anything actually having to spin. And, if I understand correctly more information can be projected onto the outer rims, pointing to, or indicating data hidden on the opposite side. Or even headlines/content if it was being used as a geoRSS reader. The other thing I like about this is that, I suspect, the image quality can be much better as it’s simply projecting a 2D image.

As a Flickr photo viewer, the location of the photos could be displayed on the globe, but the actual photo off to one side.

Anyway, the short of this is that I suspect I’m not going to be getting any Real World 3D globes for the next couple of years, so I’ll be sticking with the virtual ones. But I still need to work out what to do about the realtime updating of large numbers of data streams. Perhaps projecting directly onto my retina is the answer.

Related: Tom Carden’s The one with crazy 3D bar charts coming out of the Earth.

Filed under: general, hardware, maps