October 18

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Editor's Introduction

This week, I report on which desktop GIS programs currently do and do not support Microsoft's Vista operating system, I profile a new virtual mapping system, and I bring two New York Times articles to your attention. Plus, 29 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

Delay in Support for Windows Vista

About nine months after Microsoft launched its Windows Vista operating system, ESRI's ArcGIS does not yet support it. According to a company spokesperson:

"ArcGIS 9.3, which is expected to be out in the first half of 2008, will fully support Windows Vista. ArcGIS 9.2 SP3 (ArcGIS Explorer, ArcReader, ArcView, ArcEditor, ArcInfo Desktop, ArcInfo Workstation, ArcGIS Desktop Extensions, and ArcGIS Engine) has some known issues with Windows Vista. Some of these are issues in ArcGIS and others are the result of known issues in Windows Vista (requiring fixes from Microsoft). We are currently evaluating the severity of these issues. We expect to issue a statement regarding the support of Vista with ArcGIS 9.2 in the coming weeks. (Note: ArcGIS Server 9.2 (including ArcSDE 9.2), Image Server 9.2, and ArcIMS 9.2 are not supported on Windows Vista.)"

This statement differs from a FAQ on ESRI's online technical support center ("Does ArcGIS 9 support Microsoft Windows Vista?"], most recently updated on August 14), that states "ArcGIS 9.2 Desktop and ArcGIS 9.2 Engine are currently undergoing certification on the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. We are hoping to support these product releases under Vista later this year. Note that this certification will not include any of the ArcGIS 9.2 Server products."

I asked a few other vendors whether their desktop GIS products support Vista. Here's what they told me.

Autodesk

According to the company, the current versions of AutoCAD Map 3D, MapGuide Enterprise, and Topobase all support Vista.

Bentley

According to the company, the following products are "currently available" in Vista: Descartes, I/RAS B, CulvertMaster, FlowMaster, SewerCAD, StormCAD, WaterCAD, and WaterGEMS. Other Bentley products that support Vista "will be coming online very soon." Among those that do not yet support Vista are Map and PowerMap.

DeLorme

XMap 5.2 GIS Enterprise supports Vista (I know that for a fact, because I installed it on my new laptop, which runs Vista). According to the company, so does StreetAtlas 2008 and so will Topo7, which it plans to release in November. "Pretty much all of our programs will support Vista by the end of the year," says Geoffrey Ives, Director of Professional Sales. "The marketplace is slowly transitioning to Vista. Large enterprises are holding off before transitioning from XP." For example, he says, most energy companies have decided to wait before purchasing new laptops for their field crews.

Manifold System

"All Manifold products support Vista," says Dimitri Rotow, the company's product manager. "All of our products have supported Vista since the earliest internal Microsoft beta test versions of Vista."

Pitney Bowes MapInfo

The company says that it "has exhaustively tested MapInfo Professional" under various Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems, including Windows Vista Ultimate.

SmallWorld

According to John Eason, director of utility solutions for GE Energy's Smallworld business, the next service pack for Smallworld Core Spatial Technology (November 2007) will introduce support for MS Vista Pro Edition.

DMTI Spatial

The company announced in June that Microsoft had awarded it its Certified for Windows Vista status for its GeoPinpoint Suite Canadian geocoding software.

Earthmine Develops New Virtual Mapping System

The idea of a Web interface allowing users to navigate the streets of a city and see the view at street level is not new:

• In February 2005, A9.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., launched A9.com Maps, a service that showed users an interactive map and corresponding street-level images in a single interface. It promised to combine driving directions and other mapping tools with images of millions of places and their surroundings. The service is no longer available.
• In March 2006, Microsoft added a feature to its Windows Live Local service, which allows users to take a virtual tour of a city as if they were in a car. Microsoft said that it would use this technology for an upcoming consumer local search and mapping site. The initial release supported only the downtown cores of Seattle and San Francisco. The street-side view supplemented the aerial, road, and bird's eye views that were already available. However, Microsoft put this experiment on hold.
• At the end of May 2007, at the Where 2.0 conference, Google announced that in certain locations on Google Maps it had added a feature called "Street View."Itdisplays an interactive panorama photo and enables the user to view 360° panoramas of street-level imagery on Google Maps. Camera icons indicate the cities in which this feature is available and, when you zoom in, the streets covered are indicated in blue.

Now a new company, Earthmine, has developed an original system that goes beyond street-level panoramic views, by georeferencing every pixel in the images — thereby allowing users to add georeferenced tags, measure buildings, build 3D models, and export this data into GIS and mapping systems.

This week, I discussed Earthmine with John Ristevsky and Anthony Fassero, who founded the company about a year ago.

1. What are you trying to do?

   AF: We are focused on producing imagery and 3D data, capturing a whole new base layer of information from which people can gather, analyze, and communicate location-based information. We are looking at a whole workflow and just recently announced our technology. We started with a data collection system: vehicles that drive the streets with a stereo camera array that generates panoramic images as an interface to a very dense and detailed 3D dataset. The objects within the images have 3D locations and can be measured, modeled, and exported.

   JR: Think of it as a virtual mapping system. If you move through the panorama and start to click on things, they become 3D entities with X,Y, and Z coordinates. This can integrate with your GIS and populate it with new data. Traditionally, to populate a GIS, you would have to employ a mapping company or send out a crew with a total station to map the curb features or manhole covers. Now this can all be done virtually, within our system. Conversely, you can take data from a GIS and overlay it on top of these panoramic views and put them in context.

2. What is your system's spatial accuracy?

   JR: Around ten centimeters. Each of those vehicles is equipped with a very high grade GPS receiver and an inertial navigation system. The data is all post-processed and then the 3D data is created behind it.

   AF: It is a great tool for asset mapping, but not for engineering-grade surveys.

3. What do you want the user experience to be?

   AF: We are trying to make it just like standing on the street with a map in your hand.

4. What kind of data do you collect?

   AF: We collect stereo imagery at a regular interval throughout the city, based on distance. Every five meters, for example. From that imagery we get seamless panoramic images and generate dense three-dimensional information behind them. I could put tags on items of interest and then export that data to various file formats for whatever application I wanted to integrate it with.

5. Who will generate the content?

   JR: The content is all user-generated. We are only looking at generating a base layer of 3D panoramic imagery. 

6. Who would use this?

   AF: We are thinking, initially, that there is a big need out there for people who have GIS about their city to be able to populate it easily with data.

7. What is your strategy regarding geographic coverage?

   JR: We have been collecting a test data set of San Francisco. Our collection model is not service-driven. You cannot contract Earthmine to do your city. We are currently raising a substantial amount of capital to actually deploy a fleet of vehicles to do many cities simultaneously. We hope that within the next 18 months we will have covered most of the major metropolitan areas. We are going to look at where the benefit is going to be very quick for the cities, because they already have some sort of initiative in mind. The idea is that, over time, we would collect every major metropolitan area in the world and then we would offer access to our data to other companies. 

8. What is your business model?

   JR: We will make this available as a software as a service model. You can subscribe to the Earthmine data set, download our tools, and then have access to this imagery.

9. How does your offering differ from that of other digital map data companies?

   AF: There are many companies out there collecting very specific information. For example, Navteq and Tele Atlas collect road centerlines and points of interest (POIs). We will collect a generalized base layer of information. You can generate all those POIs, street centerlines, 3D models, and all kinds of other information from our data quite easily.

   JR: We sell a subscription to a service — a Web-based API. We collect and process the raw data and package it into a form around which developers and programmers can easily build custom, Web-based applications. Think of it like an enterprise version of Google Maps. The raw data comes in a package with the tools. End users then hit Earthmine's server via those applications. 

10. How can users export this data?

    AF: Let's say that I marked every gas station and made several 3D models in the Earthmine system, and then I wanted to extract that information and import it into my GIS. I would create those entities by clicking on them and then I would export them and select the file format that would match my need, such as KML.

    JR: [We provide] a broad range of interchange formats, such as KML and shapefiles, as well as direct connectivity with GIS and integration into CAD.

11. I could look for all the benches in a 20-block area and get their coordinates, without ever having to step away from my computer…

    AF: Exactly.

12. Can end-users download your stereo imagery and import it into their application?

    JR: No, they can't download the raw stereo imagery.

    AF: They can export a photo-textured surface into another program. For example, they can click on the four corners of a building and export that photo-textured surface in a format that is compatible with their modeling program. They can then refine the building with that model in another program that is more apt.

13. Who are you focusing on as customers?

    JR: Our focus right now is on governments and enterprises that are specifically interested in city-level assets — city government departments, cities that have enterprise GIS initiatives, insurance companies, utility companies. Then, as we begin to scale up and we get a critical mass in the United States, some interesting opportunities will come up. We are looking at location-based services, mobile content providers, and Internet mapping portals. Right now we don't have any customers on board. We are still refining the technology and looking to deploy it. 

14. How might this fit into the consumer space?

    JR: We are exploring all sorts of options — from us hosting our own portal to partnering with an existing mapping portal, such as Yahoo, MapQuest, or Google.

    AF: Because it is so easy to use, it is pretty much a natural tie-in to many Internet applications. We are hoping that some day you may be able to georeference content on line, whether to see where an event mentioned in a news article happened or to report the location of a pot hole to the city.

15. How does your system work in conjunction with satellite and aerial imagery?

    AF: You can click on an object on a satellite image and the system extracts the lat/long, finds the nearest view point, and displays it. So, the imagery from above and the panoramic imagery you look at are connected because of the common coordinate system. We are very complementary to those other types of data.

16. What is your background?

    JR: I'm Australian, originally. I studied geomatic engineering. My background is in GIS and spatial sciences. Anthony and I connected at UC Berkeley, while we were in grad school and we were both working on reality capture techniques for cultural heritage. We were both investigating panoramic photography.

    AF: In the earlier days, I was making my own photographic equipment and exploring how you can use panoramic images for exploring the 3D nature of panoramic photos and how to connect that with more advanced tools, like applied laser scanning techniques. I had done a lot of photographic equipment design and John had a lot of experience in photogrammetry. We came together and designed the equipment and then built the whole system.

    JR: We were looking at how to apply that to cultural heritage sites —such as archaeological sites. While we were doing that, we thought, why can't we apply these same techniques to cities? So that is how we came up with the idea for Earthmine.

Briefly Noted

An article in yesterday's New York Times, "Surface Navigation Help for Subway Riders," by James Barron, describes the "embarrassing, frustrating, infuriating" experience for New Yorkers of emerging from subway stations mid-block and finding themselves disoriented and describes an experimental solution: compass-shaped decals on sidewalks, 24 inches in diameter, that indicate compass directions and the names of the nearest streets. I feel vindicated, twenty-five years after I used to emerge from subway stops in New York City and pull out of my pocket… a compass!

An article in today's New York Times, "Navigating With Feedback From Fellow Drivers," by Roy Furchgott, describes the Dash Express GPS-based car navigation system, which broadcasts data about a vehicle's travels back to the Dash network, thereby allowing it to monitor traffic in real-time and advise drivers as to how best to avoid it.

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