I have to apologise again that this one is a little late but I’m still currently on a Land Administration assignment in the Solomon Islands and my available time after hours to prepare the VG limited. 

VirtualGeography is a collection of interesting snippets from all over the shop, dealing with industry issues concerning the computer based visualisation of geography and a few other associated (or otherwise) interesting bits and pieces. You are receiving this either because you subscribed to VirtualGeography or you have had recent dealings with VizMAP Pty Ltd. If you do not wish to receive further instalments of VirtualGeography, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this e-mail. 

A new VirtualGeography is pushed out about once per month, towards the end of the month, which shouldn’t be too big a drain on your mailbox if you’re not already subscribed (of course it won’t be a drain on your mailbox if you ARE subscribed, either ). If you know of anyone who might like to get VirtualGeography, feel free to forward this to them and ask them to subscribe. By the way, subscription and unsubscription details are at the bottom (click here).

So, g’day to all you enthusiasts requiring to visualise and simulate both urban and rural geographic information (GIS), cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, digital elevation modelling (DEM) and general mapping.

By the spelling of "Visualisation" you may have already guessed that we’re not US based – that’s a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. This comes to you from Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia, where it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next. The link between visualisation and mapping may seem a little esoteric if this is your first encounter with this sort of stuff, but let me tell you, the bond is significant… but enough of that: on with the show… I hope you like it. Any feedback you might have is highly appreciated. E-mail me hereto make your comments. Enjoy… Graeme Brooke VizMAP Pty Ltd

P.S. You’ll need an active internet connection to view any images that are in the content. We’ve done it this way to keep the size of the e-mail to a minimum.

Delivering a keynote address at a U.S. Government-sponsored conference on commercial remote sensing in Washington, D.C. today, Secretary of Commerce Don Evans said, “The remote sensing industry is poised for great market penetration. At our department, we recognize the promise of the remote sensing industry.” During Operation Iraqi Freedom the industry “provided timely and accurate information.” said Secretary Evans.

To begin, Kirk mentioned that looking 10 years out is a long time in the graphics business, and he reflected back 10 years to the Silicon Graphics Reality Engine just emerging, and Nvidia just starting up. Looking back another 10 years to 1983, 3D graphics was in its infancy– Silicon Graphics was just created, and there were no PC graphical interfaces or operating systems (though the original Apple Macintosh would soon surface in January 1984). 

Kirk rhetorically asked if we’ll be able to continue to pace of innovation in graphics over the next 10 years, similar to what we’ve seen in the past 10-15 years, where graphics performance has increased greater than a factor of two every year. Such growth rate is faster than the rate specified by Moore’s Law, where CPU processing power and/or transistor density doubles every 18 months on average. It turns out that actual silicon technology improves at a faster rate than Moore’s Law. When you account for both shrinking transistor size and faster switching speeds, you get more than 2X improvement in just under one year per Kirk. GPUs also accelerate in processing power faster than CPUs, because graphics is an "embarrassingly parallel" problem with a lot of stream processing, and there’s always as much work to be done as you can build processing power to handle it. As long as graphics chip architectures aren’t somehow hobbled, preventing access to the parallelism, or hiding it, Kirk estimates the same 2X per year performance growth rate can continue for the foreseeable future. 

Major enhancements in version 4.0 include: Native SoQt Library, Multi-Volume Support, Volume Geometry Nodes, Expanded Display Support, Bump Mapping Support, Improved Transparency, and much more. 

Sample still images from the completed dynamic visualisation database are displayed here. An active internet connection is required to be able to view these scenes.

Click on these small resampled images to view the full screen images on the VizMAP website. Bear in mind that these are just screen dumps from a dynamic, interactive, 3D "flythrough". 

Since that time, I have seen that kind of compartmental thinking prevalent in a number of situations. It’s almost as if many business practitioners, including the direct marketers, the internet marketers and so forth do not see the part physical geographical location has to play in their business strategy. However, before I continue, I have seen many great utilizations of spatial information, so it’s not all bad, but I do believe that through the understanding of the utility of location and the application of a few simple concepts we could see noticeable improvement in performance across a wide variety of scenarios. 

What I want to do in this article is outline some reasons why spatial information and location can be highly useful in a wide number of situations. The examples I have used primarily come from the retail or business-to-consumer world, but the concepts are equally applicable to other situations. 

• DirectionsMag Events
• GeoCommunity Year 2002 Events
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• Geoinformatics Calendar
• ISPRS Events Calendar
• National Centre for Simulation Calendar of Events
• Position Magazine Calendar of Events

In spite of the best efforts of the pilot the plane started to go down. Finally the pilot grabbed a parachute, yelled to the passengers that they had better jump, and bailed out.

Unfortunately there were only three parachutes remaining. The doctor grabbed one and said "I’m a doctor, I save lives, so I must live," and jumped out.

The lawyer then said, "I’m the smartest man in the world, I deserve to live!" He grabbed a parachute and jumped.

The priest looked at the little boy and said, "My son, I’ve lived a long and full life. You are young and have your whole life ahead of you. Take the last parachute and live in peace".

The little boy handed the parachute back to the priest and said "Not to worry, Father. The smartest man in the world just took off with my back pack."