I’ve been having another look at AR Sights – the augmented reality application that superimposes 3D models into a real-world view. It’s now available in a Mac version, and there is a greater choice of models. A web cam is required; this one looks good for other experiments such as time lapse as well. Once AR Sights is installed, simply browse the library of 3D buildings from a special Google Earth layer. It works very well.
Here’s the demo I made a little while ago.
The AR models include a number of religious buildings that make a great resource for RE lessons. In geography, students could design a suitable setting for a relocated iconic structure like the Petonas Towers.
My Year 8 project Wellington Stories aims to create a series of geo-located, short stories, poems and videos; and is reaching maturity. The students have created a really interesting series of short pieces that explore their relationship with place. These have all been mapped and the real-world locations tagged with QR codes. The final stage of the project is to publish a photographic record of the QR codes, and to contact the local press with details of the project. Thanks to all those who’ve commented on the work so far.
For those who haven’t seen “Wellington Stories” yet – here’s a short sample:
It’s been an ambition of mine to create my own immersive VR panoramas ever since I first came across the 360 Cities website. After saving up for a decent camera, lens and the requisite tripod technology, I’m finally up and running. I bulked at the cost of stitiching software though, and while I really liked PTgui and would love a copy of Autodesk Stitcher I can’t afford them. Fortunately, Hugin is free, Open Source and totally brilliant. I also use Cubic Converter to extract cube faces from the equirectangular images in order to clone out the tripod.
There’s so much to learn about this form of photography; it’s not quite as easy as I had imagined. Here’s one of the first images I’ve produced:
I’m planning to create a series of images specifically for classroom use. These will eventually be available on Juicy Geography. An example is this image of a brown-field site:
I notice that if you right click on the image you can choose different projections. This one works quite well as a “little planet”
Brownfield site, Glastonbury as a Little Planet
Please get in touch if you have suggestions for a panorama for the geography classroom. And if you do use one, why not help me to recoup the massive financial investment by donating to the site development of Juicy Geography?
My Year 8 class have been working on the Google Earth hazard planning activity: San Francisco: visualizing a safer city. I’ve added some of my own feedback to their placemarks, as the activity isn’t quite finished yet.
Basically, the idea of the activity is to locate a safe site for a new hospital, leveraging the full potential of Google Earth Layers, Street View and some custom overlays of various types of data.
A quick demo of how easy it is to the new Google Earth 5 plugin, which supports tours. No understanding of KML is necessary, simply record your tour, save as .kmz and upload to a web location. The Embedded Tour Player Gadget provides the required embed code. The Google Earth plugin needs to be enabled in the user’s browser.
To avoid irritating people without the Google Earth plugin, I’ve moved the demonstration to this page
My example illustrates Ethiopia’s controversial (aren’t they all?) Gibe III hydroelectric dam project, due to be completed in 2011. Great BBC resources here.
Here’s a short video to demonstrate AR Sights, an augmented reality application that uses a webcam and marker to display 3D models from Google Earth on your desk. The resulting output is really compelling; models can be resized rotated and moved around as illustrated in the video.
Here’s a quick mention of Thematic Mapping blog in which Bjørn Sandvik describes a number of data visualization techniques using Google Earth. Since I’m teaching about the Green Revolution tomorrow, I wanted to find a suitable animation to impress the class. A Google search led me to Bjorn’s blog and a kml file on the human population explosion that was perfect for my needs. The file can be found on this page, and is illustrated in the video:
I’m sure that many other geographers will find the population animation (and many of the other resources at Thematic Mapping) very useful.
Another discovery on Thematic Mapping, was Matt Giger’s EarthBrowser site tracker. I love EarthBrowser and was interested in this embeddable version. I tried it out but found that it currently seems to prevent Safari from scrolling properly.
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