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Visualization of Grimsvotn’s ash cloud in Google Earth

Last April we showed you a variety of imagery and tools related to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption in Iceland, as it caused some major travel delays across the globe.

This year, the nearby Grimsvotn volcano is the one erupting and causing issues, though it’s on a much smaller scale than Eyjafajallajokull’s was. To show the extent of the ash cloud from Grimsvotn, Adam Burt has built a very cool visualization in Google Earth.

Not only is it a great visualization, but it has a few extra dimensions that you wouldn’t expect; elevation and time. You can fly through the visualization to see how the ash spreads differently at different elevations, and you can also animate the entire cloud to see it in motion.

To try it for yourself, simply download this KMZ file. For more, check out the post over on Ogle Earth.

Google Earth: Gigapixel panoramas

We’ve talked before about Gigapixel images and 3D Panoramas, but it’s not often that the two come together.

For the past year, Thomas Hayden has been shooting gigapixel-quality 3D panoramas, and the quality is stunning. For example, this KMZ file takes you to OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science & Industry) in Portland, OR. Be sure to turn on the “360Cities” layer under the main “Gallery” layer.

He has recently completed shooting a 42 image set virtual tour of the museum using a GigaPan that allows him to capture very high resolution panoramas. While most GigaPan images you see these days are multi-GigaPixel “framed” panormas, he specializes in almost completely spherical location coverage. These are as high resolution as many popular gigapan images, an order of magnitude higher resolution than the standard methods for virtual tour photography. The standard methods compose a 360 from 5 or 6 individual photos, while he composed these using 112 to 126 individual 8 MP images. The average size of one of his 360s is around 220 MegaPixels (.2 GigaPixels). This resolution allows the viewer to zoom in on very fine details, and in the case of the Manuevering Room of the USS Blueback fast-attack submarine on exhibit at OMSI, allows the viewer to examine the switches, dials, and gauges that move the boat.

His first project was in creating a virtual tour of the Grand Canyon by rafting the Colorado River for 18 days last April. There are 21 images in all as part of Grand Canyon GigaView that can be found along the river over 225 miles from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek. All of the images very near to the river in the Grand Canyon that are visible on Google Earth are part of Grand Canyon GigaView. Look for the 360Cities red icons near this KMZ file. He has also built a Tumblr blog that serves as a day-by-day trip report and a place to display the media. The imagery from the Grand Canyon is absolutely stunning:

For those of you interested in the specifics of how he was able to capture the imagery for these panoramas, he’s explained his equipment in detail:

The equipment I use is half of my story, actually. I generate these images with a five year old, low end, prosumer camera (Canon Powershot S5 IS 8MP) and a GigaPan Epic 100 robotic camera mount. The GigaPan unit is designed to handle almost any brand of point and shoot camera, and together with software, become a high resolution imaging device. The concept spun out of NASA’s Mars Rover Missions where they needed small cameras (low power, light weight) to do great things. The primary resource they knew they would have on Mars was time, so the created this process for turning low end cameras into useful imagers by compositing back on earth. With money from Google, Carnegie Mellon University started the program initially with National Geographic and NASA called the Global Connection Project, which spun out into a company called GigaPan Systems to produce and market an affordable robot+software package that would make thise kind of imaging within reach of the average consumer. In the last year, GigaPan has also produced a beefier unit to manager larger DSLR prosumer cameras and their telephoto lenses.

My Grand Canyon GigaView project is not-for-profit and GigaPan supported the project by providing the Epic 100 I still use today. NRS supplied me with whitewater gear and PNY supplied me a all the SD cards I will ever need, so I had some sponsorship. I was invited on the Grand Canyon Private River Trip permit that my old raft guiding buddy had won last year in the newly formed private permit lottery system that GCNP devised in 2007 to deal with the 25 year waiting list that had become the average wait for a private rafting permit. Because I used to guide and have many friends in the river communities of the Colorado Plateau, this was my second opportunity to row a boat down the Grand Canyon through 225 river miles, 182 named named rapids, and 3 of the largest drops in North America.

Most of the images are inner canyon landscapes, but when there are people to be found in them, they are usually my fiance and I posing on a overhanging ledge or peering around a bush to see if the GigaPan had finished shooting yet, only to get caught by the robot.

Engineering a network in Haiti with Google Earth

In the time since the tragic earthquake in Haiti 14 months ago, we’ve seen a variety of uses of Google Earth to help cope with the event in various ways.

Today we’re looking at how the Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City is using Google Earth to prepare for an upcoming relief trip to the country.

Last year, the church sent 15 teams to Haiti to help repair and rebuild various facilities including churches, schools, medical clinics, and more. However, the teams had a very difficult time communicating with their support systems in the US due to poorly-operating internet connections and wifi.

Last April, Clif Guy went down to help troubleshoot and repair/upgrade internet service in the Methodist guest house in Port-au-Prince so that subsequent teams would be able to stay in communication. During that trip and over the next 6 months he made major improvements and through the process learned a great deal about ISPs in Haiti and the challenges of dealing with intermittent service and intermittent availability of electricity.

This weekend he’s heading back down to Haiti to install network infrastructure and Internet connections in five Methodist buildings in the small town of Petit Goave, on the coast 42 miles west of Port-au-Prince. One of the five buildings is a school (College Harry Brakeman) where they will also be setting up a computer lab for use by high school students. Since Internet connections are very expensive in Haiti, it’s much more economical to install a primary and backup connection and then distribute the connections to the five buildings via radio links rather than purchase a separate connection for each building.

Working with a volunteer (retired manager from AT&T) who is their advance person in Petit Goave, they used Google Earth to mark the locations of the facilities that need Internet access. Once they had locations identified, they were able use Earth to perform a virtual site survey – distance between buildings, building elevations, terrain profiles along the paths between buildings, etc. in order to engineer a building-to-building wireless network. He chose a central location on the highest ground and with the best electrical power to be our network hub. Using Earth and some simple trigonometry he was able to select directional antennas that will allow them to establish the links from the hub to the other buildings with the minimum number of radios.

It’s an impressive piece of work. The files aren’t as complex as many that we’ve shown you over the years, but the simple fact that they were able to do so much planning from so far away because of Google Earth shows just how useful it can be.

If you’d like to view their plans in Google Earth, you can download the KMZ file here. Buildings are marked with yellow push pins. Radio links are marked with red paths.