Darkwind Media Blog

This is an update to the GeoLocation Globe Application. I’ve made some updates to the RSS reading so that the updates come in more automatically. It now auto-subscribes to several Yahoo feeds and auto-updates every minute. This means you can just sit back and watch the news happen throughout the day, and how it changes across the globe.

RSS Feeds geo-located on the earth

You can browse the news stories by hovering over the little pins sticking out of the earth. The information will pop-up in a tooltip. This gives you the title of the story, its source, category, and a brief description/summary if it is available.

Browsing an news story's information

As you explore the earth, blue pins will start to pop in around you. These blue pins are discovered geo-located Flickr images. The application crawls through Flickr, finding those images that have been geo-tagged. It then populate the area around where your looking with those images. If you roll over those pins, a thumbnail of the image dynamically downloaded from Flickr will float beside your cursor.

Viewing the thumbnail of a geo-located Flickr image

Nighttime across the US overlayed with its new stories

By clicking the blue pins, the full-resolution image will be downloaded from Flickr and shown in a pop-up.

The high-res image of a geo-located Flickr image

You can dynamically filter the data by checking RSS feeds or Flickr on or off. In the future you will be able to filter both news and images by category or tag. In the image below the RSS feed has been turned off, leaving just the blue Flickr pins.

RSS feeds turned off, just viewing Flickr images

Pure globe with all geo-located data flitered off

One thing you may notice recently is that people are starting to focus more on geolocation. This is the ability to place things in geographic space. We have tons of data on the internet and more being added all the time. Tagging that data is really important if we want to be able to find it, explore it, or visualize it. One kind of tagging gaining popularity is to tag the data with location information.

With Luster we can take advantage of available web services and visualize the location of data in real-time.

We can take information from online services and databases and plot them onto the globe. Viewing information by its location is just one way of exploring it, but done correctly that can be a powerful way to visualize and see patterns in the data. What you see above are the news stories from Yahoo’s Top Stories RSS Feed. The application checks for changes every minute, so you have a real-time view of Yahoo’s top stories as they happen across the world.

And since RSS provides us with all sorts of useful information, we can let that information that is attached to each news item be viewable in the application. You can roll over each pin and see the story, its source, description, etc. When the user is interested in reading the story, a simple mouse click will navigate their browser to the story’s link.

Really, RSS feeds are the just the beginning. More data is being geo-tagged online all the time. Flickr has some 35,000 images with location tags and a powerful API that can access them. Twittr recently announced that they will be letting users opt-in to have their tweets geo-tagged. If a significant number of users start tagging their tweets with this information, we can use our application to plot where tweets happen across the world in real-time.

Yesterday, I decided that we needed a simple app demonstrating product visualization. The idea here is that within Luster we can put a 3D representation of a product, building, or part. Users can get a great feel for the design of the product by interactively moving around it. The full 3D environment Luster provides means it is easy to set this sort of application up.

For a more advanced demo, we can allow the user to interact with different parts, or perform actions on the system. For instance, for a car we could open the door and move the camera in to peer into the interior. We can let the user look under the hood and rev the engine (play a recorded sound of the actual engine). You can see in this video below an automated exploded view which we can do for any other products. We could also attach information to the product, or its parts that the user can easily access. A car might have information about optional extras, with links that lead out to the manufacturer’s website with even more information.

These sorts of application makes exploring a product more fun, and easier to navigate. Here’s some media from the demo.

We’ve been working with a client for some time now creating a new CT/MRI 3D visualizer. The main focus for the application is on image quality and user interaction. There are a few screenshots on the luster3d gallery, but here are newer screenshots from the latest version of the application. The quality is much higher now and we are beginning to focus more on product integration and user interface. You should note that the CT scan shown here is actually quite low-res. There are only 52 slices in the entire scan. Modern scanners can produce hundreds of slices per scan. You should be able to see why these scans are so useful. We can construct a sharp, accurate 3D image of a person’s body.

For those versed in medical visualization you can note that there is no special transfer function used here. The pixels are colored directly with the density value read from the scan, which means the 3D reconstruction matches the 2D slice view very closely.

In another update on the progress of the next version of Luster I thought we should mention the main reason for the time it is taking to complete: mac support. When I first started creating the Luster runtime I made a decision that I would not use any technologies or systems that could only run on a single platform. I didn’t want to close off Mac or Linux support when starting out because I knew the time would come when I would want those platforms supported. However, using cross-platform libraries and tools doesn’t automatically mean you can run something on multiple platforms.

So, after deciding that the time was right to support the Mac, we started the porting process. After a few months of learning how to develop for the Mac, the first Mac-enabled version of Luster is nearing completion. Most of Luster’s functionality is ported and I can run the majority of Luster applications in the standalone player. Look for a brand new release of Luster on both Windows and Mac in the coming weeks!

With the new version of Luster will come a whole new collection of demos. I’m most excited about Blocks, which I’ve posted about several times now. Progress on this simple game is almost complete. We’re carefully crafting the first few levels that we will release and I am working on the shadowing system that we will be using for it. So far the game has proven to be fun to make and to play. We will do some final playtesting and gameplay tweaking just before release.