whoa

[James Rogers]

On 9/4/02 1:27 PM, "lucas@gonze.com" <lucas@gonze.com> wrote:
> This just blew my mind:
> http://www.earthviewer.com/
> 
> The detail of my neighborhood -- even my building -- is unbelievable.


The first time I used it it blew my mind to.  It oozes coolness, potential,
and capability.  Kind of like in the very early days of Mosaic.

It is actually a cooler technology than what you saw.  My fiber-n-wireless
next generation broadband venture has been working with Keyhole for a while
now and we have our own custom version of the software that allows us to do
some wicked cool physical topology design stuff.  The system is capable of
much more clever 3D logic than is implied by a stock client and database.
The database backing up these systems is huge, and because it has
continuously variable resolution and data layers you can customize your view
to keep the database sane.  If you want a region of the globe mapped out to
a very high resolution (e.g. 1-meter), they can scan the area with aircraft
LIDAR and add it to the database, thereby making that region zoomable to the
resolution of the database for that area.  The nice thing about this is that
they have a single coherent globe that smoothly gains resolution as better
regional data becomes available.

Incidentally, this is definitely a 2nd generation broadband application in
terms of the amount of bandwidth it requires to work well.  You could run it
over current broadband, but for higher resolution data sets it isn't
optimal, particularly as more data layers are added to the stock database.
And the amount of storage required to run it locally is not likely to appear
on ordinary machines for a number or years yet (even then, would you want
to?).  It would be analogous to running the web over a modem; in the early
days it worked reasonably well, but not any more.  ObDisclosure:  My
secretive networking venture (Neopolitan Networks) recently became the fiber
backbone for the Keyhole EarthViewer servers.  It was a logical upgrade path
for them -- these guys leave no doubts in my mind as to what we need all the
"excess" fiber capacity for.

Yup, cool stuff coming down the pipe.


-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com