Nixta Sinks

New glasses, sir?

Google today launched Google Street Maps. A technological advance, but little more, other than perhaps a reply to Microsoft's offering (though I haven't tried that out yet because I'm too lazy to click on some links, but then again I'm so lazy I want to have decent images of where I could otherwise walk or drive so that I can recognise where on the FDR I currently am).

It's actually a neat idea, of course. People navigate by landmarks and features, not by numbers on a street. It's a method of navigation that's scalable and applicable, and instantly recognisable. It doesn't depend on the owner of the property nailing up numbers in the same place, or trees being trimmed to see the numbers, or the numbers being painted a distinctive colour or even displayed in a readable typeface (Die, Comic Sans! Die!).

However, it does rely on the landmarks being visible, and there not being "stretch-marks". In the above image, two problems are immediately apparent. The first, a compound problem: Quality of the picture. Focus and exposure. There's no way to tell that this is Circa Now on East 6th Street. The second: In order that the photography can be collected cheaply, it's good not to have traffic. You pay for fewer hours. But sadly that means that you're driving around early morning when the shops are closed (and, incidentally, the lighting in the city is bad). As an experiment, it's of course acceptable, but as a useful navigational or reference tool, it's rendered (if you'll excuse the unintented pun) utterly useless.

At last, a drunk driving simulator.

Looking at the above image of my street in Stuyvesant Town, you can see that the shutter-speed on the camera (again, probably down to the time of day and the lighting available) is not high enough. Objectively, there's no point in that image at all. Utterly useless. Perhaps worse than useless.

Of course, it will improve.

What may be interesting would be trawling through the various images available now and building up a map of better focused, better exposed imagery. Essentially a spatial representation of where imagery is useful. Could take a long time.

Much less time though will be taken before people build hacks and mashups that overlay better imagery and advertisements on the map. Perhaps a real picture of Nicole's store...

Labels: gis, google

Our house! In the middle of our sky!

When I came back to New York last year after the massive effort to get the latest release of the London project out the door (analogies and metaphors involving constipation are probably appropriate, though analogies more so because they include the word "anal"), I unwound by contemplating the design of a custom desk to replace the current old and shoddy and ugly desk/TV table combo we've had here for a few years (since back in the day when I still relied on inherited furniture). We also have a shitload of artwork to hang, and the DMC and I were keen to try to figure out what might go where (once we'd worked out how to drill into the steel walls).

Miss Circa Now's man, the Harrison Ford of the East Village, was going to help us with both tasks, but to help me work stuff out, Sketchup seemed like a good idea. It's the only software I've spent any time reading documentation on since I tried DTP on a C64 in the 80s, and boy was it time well spent. Sketchup is intuitive and slick and stable, but more to the point it does pretty much everything you want it to. For free. It's rare you find a piece of software so immediately comforting.

SKP Download (1576Kb)

So I took photos of artwork, generated a tile image of the floor (thx DMC for help with all that) and measured the apartment out to the nearest half inch, generating the resultant Sketchup file. Feel free to download it and play around. The new version of Sketchup is even better than before. I've even used Sketchup 6 to place the apartment in New York in a Google Earth kmz file, but it doesn't yet integrate well with the actual 3D building data so I'm not so happy with that at the moment.

Incidentally, it was the perfect excuse to create my own YouTube video which shows up the shoddy quality reduction (download the original 1.2Mb zipped AVI here) and the usefulness of the eye's indifference to detail over context for the progression of mass distribution of dross. God made us the perfect mindless consumers, perhaps we've peaked.

Anyway. Enough apocalyptic daydreams. On a parting note, dear reader. If you want to learn to play with Sketchup (and I recommend that you do), please invest 30 minutes in learning the concepts and trying a couple of basic tutorials. Invest!

Labels: google, sketchup, youtube