The Spatial Miscellany

Last week Google announced an umbrella API for social networks, OpenSocial. On the back of their announcement, Google have released a preview of their API. Thumbing through the API preview I expected to see some elementary support for location, perhaps a “city” or “hometown” tag that developers could geocode, so I was pleasantly surprised to find what appears to be another implementation of GeoRSS…

That is the question asked in the July\August edition of MIT technology review. In a series of articles, the magazine suggests that a world of virtual earths and mirror globes will eventually replace the internet – a MetaVerse. This idea seems to be flavour of the month with similar articles appearing in other magazines (e.g. business week) and numerous blogs (including the prolific DigitalUrban) throughout the last couple of months.

Technology Review contributor, Wade Roush, talked with Google Maps director John Hanke about the feasibility of the MetaVerse. They suggest a logical first step towards the ‘MetaVerse’ is the representation of real geography, typical of mirror worlds like Google Earth (and ArcGIS Explorer), in virtual worlds like Second Life. Increasingly examples of this can apparently be found in Second Life, for example, researchers at the University of Denver host a dynamic NOAA weather map on a Second Life island. Roush and Hanke suggest the second and marginally more challenging step will be the representation of second life and its avatars in mirror worlds like ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth. Well with the new OpenGL custom drawing capabilities in ArcGIS Explorer, that’s now possible. The wind vectors in the following video clip are rendered in OpenGL…

Why would you want to render second life avatars in ArcGIS Explorer? I really don’t know. But you can, and what’s more, you can now render any other OpenGL in ArcGIS Explorer. More usefully it may be the output of specialised software unique to your industry that you use to model, wind farms, air pollution, wind vectors or telecom coverage.

Pondering the potential of this new functionality, I discovered OGLE from eyebeam research. OGLE intercepts the OpenGL calls any application makes to the OpenGL library, using this technology it should be possible to extract anything that is drawn in OpenGL – as OpenGL, for example, the building layers in Google Earth, or even the avatars in Second Life. Using the new events and methods exposed in the new ArcGIS Explorer API, such data could now be rendered in ArcGIS Explorer (copyright permitting?).

James, Kirk and Keith remark on the latest release of ArcGIS Explorer elsewhere; and more info on the latest ArcGIS Explorer release can be found on the team blog and at the resource centre.

The exquisite Virtual London model developed at CASA, won’t be appearing in Google Earth anytime soon, read more at DigitalUrban.

This article in the Times newspaper caught my eye this morning…

“The English Premier League is suing YouTube (Google), the video-sharing website, for alleged copyright infringement.”

Here in the UK, football is our national game, we love it – we just don’t get to watch it. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television stumped up a billion pounds for exclusive rights to the Premiership (EPL), so the only way you can watch the football is to subscribe to Sky at the princely sum of £60 a month. Logging on to YouTube and watching a game for free is an attractive alternative, and a significant threat to viability of the Sky business model. If they lose their subscribers, they can’t afford the billion pound Premiership deal, they risk going bust – so they go to court.

Here we have parallels with another Google ‘business’…Google Earth. Google purchase their imagery from third party companies, on the assumption it will be used for non-commercial use…but Google seem content to let every man and his dog download Google Earth and ‘use’ the imagery for free. Great Stuff. But such acceptance of breech of copyright, will surely threaten the viability of the imagery providers business model, they will no longer be able to afford the plane, the camera or other overheads, they will risk going bust – is it not plausible, that one day, they too will have to go to court?

Ok, now I know we’re gazing into a crystal ball here, but this is a blog post…

Sky has a market capitalisation of £10 Billion, an imagery provider…maybe £20 Million…orders of magnitude difference. How much will a court case cost Google, a court case they are likely to lose? Much less than buying Sky, but enough to make purchasing an imagery provider good business sense.

Well it’s been six months since the Ordnance Survey (OS) announced a beta of their Openspaces API and we’ve heard no more? Attendees at the UK Geospatial Mashup event held at the OS last October where treated to a sneak preview – it looked good, a Google Maps like API using OS data (slides are online at the OGC). This is just the kind of service the UK public deserve, and in my opinion, the type of service the OS needs to start providing if they are to fully capitalize on future opportunities and compete in a fast changing market place.

Chinese whispers at the Mashup event last October suggested it would go live within six months…or not at all. Hopefully it’s just around the corner, pending execution, and their CTO joining Google was just a coincidence.