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The main power supply over in the florescent lit basement where the digital urban servers sit is being shutdown over the weekend for testing.
As such the blog will be missing images here and there so please accept our apologies for the shoddy nature of the posts over the next 48 hours.
Once all the safety boxes are ticked we should be back up and running in time for a new week...
The movie below is our first timelapse test using the Canon G9, a power supply and the free CHDK firmware 'addon' for a range of Canon cameras.
Music 'City Lights' by Ox on MP3 Unsigned.
As mentioned, movie was created by capturing a 5 mega pixel image every 5 seconds, this allowed enough resolution to do the pan in post processing as well as the ability to crop out sections of the image.
As long as we got the settings correct you should be able to run the clip at 1920x1080 via YouTube. CHDK allows a wide range of Canon cameras to be used as timelapse rigs - indeed it arguably makes Canon the first choice for anyone wishing to creating an HD timelapse.
The movie is our first test, the technique should allow some good 'stacked night time images' of the city to be created - the image below was created from 8000 images to reveal activity in the sky above a city at night:
The image was created using a simple webcam - see our tutorial for more details, with CHDK we should be able to enhance this considerably.
Perhaps we need to get out more, but we are getting quite excited about the possibilities of HTML 5. The ability to build applications that run naively in the browser without the need for plugins will allow agencies such as the police, government, health service etc a to view data that is currently restricted due to rules on installing plugins/software on networks.
As such imagine our joy when we discovered Cartagen - a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap. In short, Cartagen lets you make beautiful, customized maps with a simple stylesheet.
Maps are styled with Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information – a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible. However, GSS is a scripting language as well, making Cartagen an ideal framework for mapping dynamic data.
Head over to Cartagen for a look, thanks a lot to Kirk of MossCreekMedia for sending this one in.
We have spent the last couple of hours adding the docklands light railway to our Geographic London Tube Map for use in a paper:
We are a couple of days late to the table on this one due to various reasons, work, moving flat, the failure of the British telecoms system to sort out any sort of broadband connection. However, this is of note as it allows a 3D model to be constructed using a standard webcam Qi Pan Gerhard Reitmayr and Tom Drummond of the Machine Intelligence Laboratories, Department of Engineering, Cambridge University.
The YouTube clip below explains all:
This weeks NewScientist has a good article entilted '3D mash-up maps let you 'edit' the world. Written by Colin Barras it notes that armchair explorers who soar over 3D cityscapes on their computer may be used to the idea of maps with an extra dimension. But they are now getting accurate enough to offer much more than a preview of your next holiday destination. Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments.'
Colin dropped us a email here at digital urban, our thoughts are included in the article - you can read the online version via the NewScientist website.
The clip below was produced by Paul Gill for Sky Television:
Clone Wars Promo from paul gill on Vimeo.
The papers are coming thick and fast at the Future Internet Journal - the latest paper describes a follow up Web 2.0 approach to a technology enhanced master course for students of Graz University of Technology.
The lecture “Social Aspects of Information Technology” has a long tradition for using new didactical scenarios as well as modern e-Learning technologies. After using a blogosphere one year ago, this year microblog channels helped to expand the traditional lecture. Students choose (on a voluntary basis) whether they want to participate in a blogging/microblogging group instead of using conventional methods called Scientific Writer/Scientific Reviewer. This study addresses the question whether this method can change the learning outcome into a more reflective one. Furthermore, peer-reviewing groups judge the quality of essays and blog contributions. In this paper we examine if microblogging can be an appropriate technology for assisting the process. This publication comes to the conclusion that an amazing potential and a new way to work with information is opened when using microblogging. Students seem to be more engaged, reflective and critical in as much as they presented much more personal statements and opinions than years before.
The paper is an interesting look at Web 2.0 and blogging in academia - something we know a little about having come under notable criticism a few years ago for putting everything we do in a blog. Personally, the Future Internet Journal is indicative of these changes with fast turn around times and publication in terms of weeks rather than months/years.
You can read/download the full paper via the Future Internet Journal site.
