In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Makai Ocean Engineering, Inc. has released a full-featured version of its Makai Voyager™ geospatial visualization software at http://voyager.makai.com. Version 1.2 enables users to import and visualize their own scientific and GIS data in a “Google Earth-like” viewer.

KAILUA, HAWAII – Makai Ocean Engineering, Inc. has released a free trial version of its geospatial visualization software, Makai Voyager. This release represents a leap forward in advanced volumetric data visualization and analysis. Individual or group licenses are available on Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux, and Mac OS X.

Originally developed for the US Naval Oceanographic Office’s large ocean models, Makai Voyager enables users to import, fuse, view, and analyze large earth, ocean, and atmosphere scientific data as it is collected or simulated in a global geo-referenced GIS platform. The key differentiator of Makai Voyager is its level-of-detail (LOD) technology that enables users to stream 'big data’ rapidly over a network or the web.

Features in Version 1.2:

•             Preprocessing LiDAR, GIS, & volumetric data from common formats into streamable files;

•             Volume rendering for large 4D (3D + time) data, such as NetCDF;

•             Analysis tools & customizable graphs;

•             WMS and other streamable formats;

See example project videos at http://voyager.makai.com/industries.php, or download the full-featured 30-day trial of Makai Voyager today at https://voyager.makai.com/products.php!

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode, covering a way too long time-span.

On the open source / open data front:

• GeoWeb Guru reviews the OpenLayers Cookbook by Antonio Santiago Perez: "The book is formatted as a series of 60 'recipes' that demonstrate how to perform various tasks." And here's another review on the same book.
• Some Province of Quebec open geodata and public WMS layers (in French)
• There was some OSGeo-Incubators announcements, the ZOO-Project, Opticks, OGC TEAM Engine and the Marble Virtual Globe are all part of the OSGeo incubation now
• The Cartaro CMS in now available as beta
• GeoTools 8.2 has been released
• Here's how to create a nice seafloor map using shaded relief and open source software

On the Esri front:

• Several sources pointed to the ArcGIS Online Service Credits Estimator

On the Microsoft front:

• For those interested, Bing Maps SDKs for Windows Store Apps Now Available

Geo-related stories discussed over Slashdot:

• Nokia Keeps Quietly Mapping The World
• The Case That Apple Should Buy Nokia
• 3D input device: Microsoft's Hand-Gesture Sensor Bracelet
• And Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique
• Image classification crowdsourcing: ForestWatchers Lets Anyone Monitor A Patch of Forest
• LightSquared Wants To Share Weather-Balloon Frequencies for LTE
• An academic Android trojan that take pictures of your home and more, PlaceRaider Builds a Model of Your World With Smartphone Photos
• Can Foursquare Data Predict Where You Live?
• That candy bar that tracks you, Nestle's GPS Tracking Candy Campaign

More on Apple Maps from MacRumors and APB:

• Apple's 3D Maps and Imagery See Incremental Improvements
• Apple Turning to Select Retail Store Employees to Help Improve Maps for iOS 6
• Insiders Detail Steve Jobs' Role in Apple's Mapping Effort
• APB tells us Why is the Press Still Talking About Apple Maps

In the miscellaneous category:

• O'Reilly warns us of drones for warfare
• Yes, Wearable LIDAR Sensors for Mapping (via OR)
• APB informs us of MyDigitalGlobe cloud service to make DigitalGlobe imagery more discoverable with OGC catalog services (CWS): "A unique feature of the service is that alerts can be set to notify a user when a new image is added to the library of a specific area of interest."
• For those in hydrography, look at the U.S. National Hydrography Dataset Plus Version 2

In the maps category:

• It's worth taking a look at the Information is Beautiful Awards Winners, it's not all maps, but still pretty
• Via Mapperz, here's the CEC North American Environmental Atlas which is actually pretty interesting
• A Google Maps of Ancient Rome, via OR
• Here's a map of the The World’s Most Expensive Cities

Makai Ocean Engineering, Inc. has released a new demonstration version of its geospatial visualization software, Makai Voyager. The new release, available at http://voyager.makai.com, demonstrates Makai Voyager’s advanced volumetric data visualization and analysis capabilities.

Makai Voyager provides users with an easy to access, cross-platform software package to process, analyze, fuse, and display vast amounts of scientific and GIS data being collected and simulated in the earth, ocean, and atmosphere.

The 1.1 update is a major release, and includes many new features:

• Volume rendering of large 4D data models;
• Display of dynamic data on the ocean surface;
• Customizable graphs of scientific data; and,
• Faster streaming and improved WMS support.

The downloadable demo contains many of the scientific visualization capabilities of the Makai Voyager software platform. The full version of Makai Voyager will contain a wide variety of data import and fusion tools to import and process GIS and scientific data, and provide users with access to add-on modules for specific tasks (e.g., LIDAR analysis). Makai Voyager is cross-platform software, and runs on Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux, and Mac OS X.

Makai welcomes inquiries about Makai Voyager and our other software products and services. For more information about Makai, visit http://www.makai.com.

Wemo Media Unveils Global Art Entertainment Experience: theBlu.com

Academy Award Winners, Top-Tier Universities and Digital Creators From All Around the Globe Join Wemo Media's mission to Create the World’s Largest Art and Entertainment Project

LOS ANGELES, CA - October 18, 2011 – Wemo Media (http://www.wemomedia.com), collaborating with digital industry leaders, including Avatar Academy Award winning animation director Andy Jones and MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, announced today the launch of their “Maker Media” platform, which enables artists and developers around the world to peer-produce globally shared media.

Wemo Media's first project, theBlu (http://theblu.com), bringing the Ocean to life on the web, is a global mission to create art and entertainment on a scale that was not possible before the Internet. Using the Maker Media Platform, theBlu engages people from around the world to create and experience shared art in real time online.

“I’ve always thought it would be cool to create a simulation of the ocean with all the vast variety of species, but every time I would consider it, I’d realize that it was just too ambitious,” said Oscar-winning Visual Effects Supervisor and lead member of theBlu, Kevin Mack. “But theBlu makes this possible because you have thousands of artists from all over the world collaborating.”

theBlu promises to marry the Web’s billions of points of interaction with the Ocean’s millions of diverse elements in a nexus where the Web is, itself, a new medium for artistic expression. Imagine hundreds of thousands of aquatic species in tens of thousands of underwater habitats – all beautiful works of art created by artists and developers all over the world, swimming across the Web via phones, tablets and computers from Los Angeles to London, Madrid to Mumbai and Sao Paulo to Seoul.

Wemo Media Leadership Team member and Academy Award Winner Louie Psihoyos, Director of The Cove states, “One of the biggest problems that the oceans face is that people don't see what's going on in the Ocean. This project is a way for people to put their heads under the water without getting wet, a terrific way for people to not only see the Ocean but actually create it.”

theBlu is the first of many such Maker Media titles that Wemo Media will be releasing through its groundbreaking Maker Media Platform. This disruptive media creation platform welcomes all types of creatives – artists, software engineers, animators, composers – to collaborate from all over the world. Currently in private beta, the Maker Media Platform has already been embraced by top-tier universities around the world, including MIT, USC and CMU, whose students are some of the first “Makers” on the innovative platform.

Director of the MIT Media Lab, Joichi Ito, and advisor to Wemo Media said, “My life, and now even more so with the MIT Media Lab, has been about pulling together things that aren’t normally together. The really interesting thing about theBlu is how it brings together the biology, the activism of conservation, the beauty and the artistic elements as well as the grassroots, participatory maker media movement. I'm very excited about the possibilities ahead.”

Makers in theBlu select the species and habitats they want to create, and submit their art on the Maker Platform for curation. Makers showcase their art to a global audience while they connect with a community of peers, receive direct feedback from world-class digital makers, like Kevin Mack and Andy Jones, and get paid for their contributions based on the popularity of their creations.

“We’re just getting started. TheBlu is in private beta and we invite you to join early and become a seminal part of this global collaborative art and entertainment movement,” said Founder and CEO Neville Spiteri. “We are passionate about the enabling power of the social web, we are moved by creations that strike global chords, like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album and Google Earth, and we are inspired by the great storytellers of our time, like James Cameron and John Lasseter. theBlu represents a new art form where the canvas is the web and the topic and the inspiration is nature, the Ocean; an amazing combination of ‘code + data = art’, with everybody contributing from all over the world, together, on the web.”

Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From the official sources:

• Google announced another imagery update for Google Earth/Maps
• Google detailed their Latitude and Places apps updates for iPhone
• There are new Google Maps domains for 11 countries
• Google shared an entry on marine debris and a kml made by NOAA

From other sources:

• The GEB informs us on four new cities added to Building Maker: Rome, New Orleans, Long Beach, Malibu
• The GEB has an entry on Gigapixel panoramas, a mix of gigapixel images and 360 degrees panaromas
• The GEB shares an entry on the Global Heritage Network: "The Global Heritage Network is the product of successful partnership with Google, Esri and DigitalGlobe, with those companies having donated millions of dollars in critical support, satellite imagery and GIS-mapping technologies to enable early warning and monitoring for 500 global heritage sites."
• The GEB offers an entry on a 3D model of the traditional tomb of Esther and Mordechai in Hamadan, Iran.