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- Ray Ozzie: by Steven Levy
- Kitchen Installed
- A Hole in the Wall
- Bathroom: Ready for Rendering
- Private Angus Hodge
- Hodge Family History Update
- Kitchen Destruction
- “It’s Not a Sad Time”
- Field Marshal Melchett
- A Pragmatic Proposal: ISP Filters
- Edna Dutschke
- Steve Ballmer at CEDA 7th November 2008
- Liam and and I at Barcamp Sydney 4
- Bathroom Renovation: The Destruction
- USofA… just when I about to love you again
- Microformat hCard
- Tech support. Yes, this is so close to reality
- Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity
- Live Mesh: MacOS, Windows Mobile
« Amber Mac | Main | GeoTravelling »
Geotagging: Three Dimensions off our Virtual Future
By Nick Hodge | August 29, 2006
Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geotagged: spent the greater part of today geotagging my images stored in Flickr. Geotagging is the addition of spacial or geographical metadata (that is: latitude and longitude) to my uploaded images. The four cameras I've used do not have GPS, so this geotagging caper is a manual post-processing effort.
The resolution of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and London are excellent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo's map was strangely low resolution. At the time of writing, 600,000 images have a geotag according to Flickr. Microsoft's Local Live and Google's Google Maps are way better.
Why invest the time?
Somewhere, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a certain day. Or, some smart software is going to create an interesting view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF camera data for many years. These two dimensions are excellent for locating on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough "resolution" to be for our Virtual Future. Apart from the height, the target, tilt and heading would provide more data: Imagine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geotagged, Microsoft PhotoSynth'd world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the virtualized clouds.
A most pleasant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting yourself, remembering the streets of London without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliving the past, virtually. The future will be more out there and immersive.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Ray Ozzie: by Steven Levy
- Kitchen Installed
- A Hole in the Wall
- Bathroom: Ready for Rendering
- Private Angus Hodge
Topics: flickr, future, geotag, google, microsoft, personal, tagging, technology |
August 29th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Thanks for the links unclenick - we talked about this at your place but I forgot to follow it up. Reminds me of my trip to Vegas for CES 2005. It became very clear that phones with decent lenses, gps and clocks would make for interesting captures of mundane events.
Fang
August 30th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
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