In 2007 (that is 3 years ago!) Blaise Aguera y Arcas, along with Microsoft, astonished us by presenting the Seadragon and Photosynth technology. It was, and still is very very impressing and embedded below.
On this years TED conference he was at it again – and – astonishing everyone again with an augmented reality “intelligent” map application. It is amazing what his team manage to develop!
The obvious competitor is Google Maps which probably has a better grip at the market. However, Google does not compete at all with the technology presented at TED – although they do have more users – and maybe an easier solution fitting more users?
Today I came across the TED Talk of Parag Khanna titled “Parag Khanna maps the future of countries“. Interested in maps, the title itself drew me towards it. And I can say it was an interesting talk! Very interesting ideas on how to solve the current/future problems of the world. What I found most intriguing was the heavy use of maps as both driving the idea of itself as well as presenting the ideas. Almost no words are used in the “slides” only maps and visual animations. This is what makes a good presentation!
From a cartographic perspective the map use was a bit novel. When emphasizing some countries (i.e. France, Italy, Spain and Russia) the map simply only displayed these countries – and nothing else. Surprisingly this worked very well – probably due to the common knowledge of a world map that everyone shares. There are a lot of subtle cartographic “tricks” that were used – it is worth watching the presentation just for this reason.
I got inspired from this technique of both (seemingly) generating ideas from maps and in addition using almost solely the map as the presentation medium.
The fifth and last day of the workshop – scheduled to end 12:00. Thus it was only time for one session and a finalizing keynote.
Session 4-1 was titled Spatial analysis of urban systems which Dafna Fisher-Gewirtzman started off with the presentation Visual analytical tools for environmental and urban systems – the visual openness & visual exposure model in regard to internal space layout and functionality. The research was founded in the field of architecture – and thus presented a slightly new view and applicability of GIScience. In essence what they did was to calculate the view from inside of apartments/houses and to the outer geography termed visual openness (I think). Visual exposure was the opposite – namely the view from outside surroundings to the inside of the building. When visualized and interpreted this gives an indicator of the quality of the building. For residential buildings it is not desirable to have a very large degree of visual exposure e.g. you do not want to live in a glass house next to a busy side walk. However you do want some visual exposure and you definitely want to have a certain degree of visual openness. To calculate both these metrics they had used the spatial geography and the building data. The applicability of this were for this point to inspire architecture and design students – which it worked very good at. One example shown was a “re-design” contest for several residential blocks which were at the lower end at the social scale. Altering the interior, and to some degree the exterior, to consciously affect the visual exposure and openness in a positive way – they found several creative solutions – which seemed to be very promising. However, as noted from the audience, the feasibility of re-designing buildings at this level is not good. The cost would probably be higher than building new buildings from scratch. All in all I found the use of GIScience as a creativity enhancing tool to be very nice – and proves that GIScience is not just an analytical tool for domain experts.
Next presentation was Spatial analysis of the diffusion of photovoltaic installations in private households in Baden-Württemberg, held by Susanne Linder. In essence they calculated the way photovoltaic (solar cells) installations spread throughout a section of Germany and at which time it did. Motivation for this was a new energy law opening for regular households to feed back energy to the power net and thus get compensation for this. I didn’t find the topic particularly interesting – although probably to some degree useful. They relied mostly on Hägerstrand’s theory on spatial diffusion (1967) – which I do not know in detail.
Third out was the presentation Development of a top-down approach to calculate residential space heating demand in Baden-Württemberg. Which followed the trail of the previous presentation. A fairly standard (at least seemed to be) GIS analysis and presentation. Essentially finding the heating (not cooling) demand of residential areas.
This ended the sessions for the workshop. To end of the workshop Jean-Claude Thill held the keynote titled “TBD” (to be decided) – as a “joke”. However the topic covered was his thoughts on differences and similarities between Regional Science and GIScience. Which was ok, but not actually any bombshell to end the workshop on.
And that was it for this time. All in all, I found the summer school and particularly the workshop to be inspiring – at least it is nice to see what others are doing – and how they do it. Of course it is also very nice to meet other people working in more or less the same field – which (unfortunately) do not happen that often in Norway.
