Keyhole interactive aerial photos from Google.....swoop your DZ!

[marcandalysse 0]

http://www.keyhole.com/index.html?promo=hpp-en-us-1

Have you seen this yet? Google just bought Keyhole aerial mapping....they have a link to it on www.google.com as well.

You will have to download a 7 day trial, and register for it (they send a license key via your email).

Once installed, you can choose any place in the USA, and it zooms and tilts and pans using your mouse. It even gets 3-D when the terrain allows it.

I zoomed in on zhills as if I was in freefall, then using the tilt and zoom together, landed right in the peas. Next, I swooped the pond!!

cool!

marc

[ACMESkydiver 0]

That is cool...y'know, it would be even better if it was in REAL TIME...

~Jaye
Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.

[flyingferret 0]

Also has a great API back end to feed it with GPS geocodes. Very cool integration with existing backend data. It can track assets in real time, based on the geocodes. This combine with the aerial photos, even though they are not real time, gives the illusion of real time asset tracking, very cool to see.

--
All the flaming and trolls of wreck dot with a pretty GUI.

[LouDiamond 1]

Something very,very similar and even better...it's absolutely free is NASA World Wind and it provides coverage of just about everywhere on the PLANET. The 3D effects and the atmospheric historical data player is incredible. It's a big download and the imagery servers can get a bit bogged down but hey, it's free

"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

[flyingferret 0]

The features and screenshots look very cool on there. However, the scalable nature of Keyhole, along with the API make keyhole much more commercially viable. World Winds is a learning tool that shows massive data, and latency is not a concern.
Keyhole was built to scale over almost any connection, and allows you to tweak all kinds of settings to eliminate latency. For asset tracking it is very very impressive. Much better in my opinion that AutoDesk maps, because the wow factor from photographic images.
If you just want fun World Winds is probably better to play with. If you want a front end for a tracking system Keyhole is a different product. This was a wise wise acquisition for google.

--
All the flaming and trolls of wreck dot with a pretty GUI.

[LouDiamond 1]

Well if thats what you want to do then THIS may interest you as well. Combined with products you can get from keyhole the amount of things you can do with ArcGIS is really truely amazing for a commercially availbale product.

"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

[flyingferret 0]

Intriguing. I work for a manufacturer of transportation logisitics, which is an odd field. Customers think they want bleeding edge tech, but in reality usually don't need it and won't pay for it. So you have to provide very specific feature sets without any expensive bells and whistles. Keyhole is a good API for that.
There is another niche set of customers that truly desire backend integration and will take ownership of the system and fuel development. For someone like that, that will truly use the full data scope, a GIS solution is always an intriguing option.

--
All the flaming and trolls of wreck dot with a pretty GUI.

[LouDiamond 1]

Do you currently use Keyhole in the manner which you described? just from browseing the web site I see their imagery is in the 18-24 month range or older from current day, which is what you can get with world wind and USAPhotmaps for free. In fact the web site says the premium add on features allow of ERSI overlays(go figure huh?)

I'm just wondering if keyhole Pro offers some additional features that really makes it more applicable to your use than any of the other free stuff out there. I am assuming you're wanting the imagery to use as an overlay to visualy track cargo on the ground as it's being tracked with integrated GPS technologies on the platforms?

"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

[dorbie 0]

I used to work for Keyhole before Google bought them. I wrote the image processing software that builds and blends the global database from multiple image sources and wrote some of the 3D rendering software.

With Google funding behind them now they'll be adding higher resolution data over larger areas as time goes on. The data over any particular area is only as recent as the time the aircraft or satellite flew over to take the images. It varies from place to place but the whole process of data collection and orthorectification can be quite expensive. Coverage is a bit hit & miss for now driven by image availability.

If you really want to see what the system is capable of go to downtown San Diego, there is ~3inch data there, very impressive. Technically teh system could do this over the whole planet. The Las Vegas strip has some pretty good data too. The highest resolution data in the database is outside the VAB at Cape Canaveral, there's ~1.5 inch data of a space shuttle taken by a photographer on the roof of the VAB. You can just about see the tiles on the Space Shuttle. If you want to see some cool 3D try Salt Lake City and /or the Hoover Dam.

The basic license is about $30 and that lets you connect to the database for a year.

There is an enhanced version of the software that allows you to add your own data on the client side, for example dragging and dropping an aerial photo of your own DZ onto the client then stretching it to fit in the correct location. AFAIK this is part of the more expensive "Pro" software though. It would be great if they shipped it as a standard feature, but they've gotta make their money I suppose. You could use this drag & drop feature to add your own more recent data and/or higher resolution data to small regions like your local DZ.

The drag & drop supports transparency from PNG format images so you could for example draw a landing pattern diagram and superimpose it on a 3D view of your DZ, then rotate it for various wind directions.

[weegegirl 2]

Wow. That sounds like a fun job. You must be pretty stinkin talented.

• Quote

[dorbie 0]

Quote

Do you currently use Keyhole in the manner which you described? just from browseing the web site I see their imagery is in the 18-24 month range or older from current day, which is what you can get with world wind and USAPhotmaps for free. In fact the web site says the premium add on features allow of ERSI overlays(go figure huh?)

I'm just wondering if keyhole Pro offers some additional features that really makes it more applicable to your use than any of the other free stuff out there. I am assuming you're wanting the imagery to use as an overlay to visualy track cargo on the ground as it's being tracked with integrated GPS technologies on the platforms?

I think you're missing the 3D interractive aspect of the software. Although you can't really swoop in the keyhole software, (the 3D eyepoint movement is driven by the GUI) it's fast and very interractive even while you're waiting on data, it also caches data you're used to using locally but it's not a flight simulator with a canopy model. The GUI isn't designed with flight in mind (although there were prototypes internally...). It is 3D and you do 'fly' around in 3D using the mouse & GUI to view the data.

As I described the PRO software has a number of enhanced features, like overlays, 'movie' animations, high resolution printing, and data import from GIS packages.

w.r.t. other's comments the Keyhole software has a back end authoring & server suite and the front end client software. It's not really an API... yet. It uses WGS-84 coordinates and is compatible with GPS, it can even support GPS tracking now, but this would fall into the realm of bespoke engineering, there's no API or plugin format I know of yet, but I've been away from the company for a while and I know they'be been working on a bunch of improvements and contract stuff on the client side. Adding lots of GPS data is straightforward really, the problem is doing it cleanly in a way customers can exploit it with their own data and perhaps search it, filter it, label it etc. They may have done that by now.

[LouDiamond 1]

Quote

I think you're missing the 3D interractive aspect of the software

The NASA software offers 3D as well, all though Keyhole does have the neat fly in feature as seen on CNN but NASA WW will sort of do the same thing when you manualy zoom down(in). But if I remember correctly the ability to make those types of "movies" was only available on the keyhole PRO version.

I know of a few progs that will allow real time GPS feeds into the system via laptop or handheld(wireless or co-located with the receiver/cellular) but the only thing I am aware of that will do it real time accross significant distances and show it on imagery is not available to the general public. Closest thing I believe is ArcGIS mobile and I seem to remember a few commercial companys that provide satellite GPS tracking but it has a very niche clientel and I don't think it shows locations overlayed on actual sat imagery/graphics, it just provides a GPS grid/location/status data. I know there is a commercialy available Cellular version that uses Microsoft MapPoint which is like Streets & Trips on steroids, again, no sat imagery.


I think a lot could change in the near future as some of this technology will either bleed off and or trickle down for the average persons use.

"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required"
Some people dream about flying, I live my dream
SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING

[dorbie 0]

Yep the NASA software came along after the keyhole stuff, it's free but it doesn't have the same data & features.

There's nothing difficult about GPS, it's trivial by comparrison to everything else these applications do. You can get a serial connection to a GPS device and get a simple WGS 84 coordinate, there's even a standard interface. For software to use this info is trivial, especially if that's the coordinate system native to your application.
I've seen the Keyhole stuff connect to a GPS device and move the view to track your position, I just don't think it was productized (circa 2 years ago). The NASA stuff could no doubt support this with equal simplicity.

This stuff will definitely reach the ordinary person (at $30 for Keyhole and free for NASA with source code you could argue it's already there considering the ease of adding GPS) your cellphone may be be supporting this stuff sooner than you expect.

P.S. IMHO this image based stuff is heavily content driven so it's not enough to have the software, you need data and this kind of data is a very large complex problem, at least to get global seamless homogeneous data. To get any worthwhile high resolution coverage you're talking about absolutely massive quantities of data, and then after processing you have to have the server infrastructure & bandwidth to serve it because it can't be stored locally unless you're only interested in local data. Add to that issues of updates and data versioning and you begin to see the complexity of a working live system.