MapQuest Does Street Level Imagery

So yea, not a surprise.

As the name implies, 360 view provides fantastic panoramic views (360 horizontally and 160 vertically) of any given image within the 360 View coverage area (initially 30 cities and 15 suburbs across the United States with more to come). We have studied our industry, gleaning tidbits here and there, and polled our customer base in creating a simple, easy-to-use interface that fits seamlessly into the MapQuest mapping experience you have come to know and understand. Best of all, MapQuest 360 View “just works” without requiring any 3rd party player downloads.

Take that Bing Maps and your 3rd party player download. MapQuest works without any Silverlight player to get in your way… except of course it uses a 3rd party player called Flash. I suppose this plays into Adobe’s assertion that their 3rd party player download is included by default in many browsers by default. Still it looks good and appears to have been taken sometime last year (the light rail line isn’t running yet in Phoenix and most stations haven’t been built yet.

A view of University of Phoenix Stadium where youll be seeing the true national championship; TCU vs BSU.

A view of University of Phoenix Stadium where you’ll be seeing the true national championship; TCU vs BSU.

Now before you start going off an claiming this doesn’t matter, remember the real traffic numbers for the four main mapping sites:

Yep, Bing and Yahoo don’t add up to MapQuest’s reach. I think it is critical to get this functionality into their API before more companies abandon it for Google While traffic numbers trend down over the last 6 months, I’m not sure it is losing to Bing or Yahoo.

December 14, 2009 Thoughts

Git Yer ArcGIS 9.3.1 Service Pack 1

Yep, the service pack to the .1 release is here:

UPDATE: Yikes, I left off ArcGIS Military Analyst 9.3.1 Service Pack 1

You can learn more on the “Issues addressed with Service Pack 1” page. I can’t think of any other way to celebrate than dear old Rocky Top…

ArcGIS, you’ll always be home to me…

December 14, 2009 Thoughts

Git Yer ArcGIS 9.3.1 Service Pack 1

Yep, the service pack to the .1 release is here:

UPDATE: Yikes, I left off ArcGIS Military Analyst 9.3.1 Service Pack 1

You can learn more on the “Issues addressed with Service Pack 1” page. I can’t think of any other way to celebrate than dear old Rocky Top…

ArcGIS, you’ll always be home to me…

December 14, 2009 Thoughts

The Use of Game Engines in GIS

Autodesk has been heavily investing in their 3D technology which includes bringing on 3D game developers to help with visualization. I imagine their pitch, “Do you want to make millions programming games or change the world with 3D Studio Max?”.

Anyway I received this link to a company called Clover Point which is doing impressive things with 3D gaming engines and enterprise management with their Asset Tracking Anywhere. Yea I know what you are thinking, how could I possibly get excited about something as boring as enterprise management Well in my pervious life (before da cloud) I was heavily involved with asset management and CAFM. Now if you’ve ever been involved with this, you know how ugly the tools and how non-technical people have a great difficulty visualizing the data presented to them.

ESRI users take note:

Asset Tracking Anywhere also utilizes ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. This suite of products offers advantages over standard map engines in the ease of data layering, data creation, data visualization, data capture, raster-to-vector translation and the manipulation of projection and coordinate systems.

Detailed 3D models and immersive views are a great way to showcase your resources to managers and help them visualize their assets around the world. Tabular reporting just doesn’t help people understand the impacts of planning and future changes to their business like a great 3D model. Of course 3D modeling in GIS has been very basic, so I’m happy to see companies pushing the envelope on this.

Check out some of Clover Point’s work in these YouTube videos. As I said, very impressive stuff. What I see here is BIM and GIS coming together to help people make informed decisions.

December 13, 2009 Thoughts

The Use of Game Engines in GIS

Autodesk has been heavily investing in their 3D technology which includes bringing on 3D game developers to help with visualization. I imagine their pitch, “Do you want to make millions programming games or change the world with 3D Studio Max?”.

Anyway I received this link to a company called Clover Point which is doing impressive things with 3D gaming engines and enterprise management with their Asset Tracking Anywhere. Yea I know what you are thinking, how could I possibly get excited about something as boring as enterprise management Well in my pervious life (before da cloud) I was heavily involved with asset management and CAFM. Now if you’ve ever been involved with this, you know how ugly the tools and how non-technical people have a great difficulty visualizing the data presented to them.

ESRI users take note:

Asset Tracking Anywhere also utilizes ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. This suite of products offers advantages over standard map engines in the ease of data layering, data creation, data visualization, data capture, raster-to-vector translation and the manipulation of projection and coordinate systems.

Detailed 3D models and immersive views are a great way to showcase your resources to managers and help them visualize their assets around the world. Tabular reporting just doesn’t help people understand the impacts of planning and future changes to their business like a great 3D model. Of course 3D modeling in GIS has been very basic, so I’m happy to see companies pushing the envelope on this.

Check out some of Clover Point’s work in these YouTube videos. As I said, very impressive stuff. What I see here is BIM and GIS coming together to help people make informed decisions.

December 13, 2009 Thoughts

ESRI Sends Geography Network to Pasture

I know there are two groups of people out there right now. Those who can’t believe the Geography Network is still running and those who forgot it existed. Well now both sets of you can now know that it is going to be retired at the end of this year.

With lots of changes over time to online GIS and geographic information and the technologies used to serve them, the?Geography Network has been replaced by better alternatives to publish and find data (like ArcGIS Online). Much of the same exact content, and much more content that has been updated,?can now be found and used in easier and better ways. So ESRI is planning to retire the Geography Network in late December 2009.

Can you believe it has been almost 10 years?

December 9, 2009 Thoughts