CIA - the Crowd-sourced Intelligence Agency

The private production of geospatial intelligence is increasingly getting into the spotlight. We saw the successful crisis mapping efforts in Haiti and now we see The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) produce volunteered spatial analysis and mapping from high resolution imagery and field reports. The quality of these reports are impressing even to seasoned military commanders. As with any tool it can be used for good and bad, to inform and misinform. It's great when goodhearted people get together and make this possible. The scary thing is that the 'bad guys' also will do this.

Next generation Digital Earth - 2020

Responding to a survey from the International Society for Digital Earth got me thinking and offering some thoughts, mostly bits and pieces from previous ramblings on this blog, but maybe some new nuggets. The whole idea of a digital Earth was well formulated in Yale Professor David Gelernter's book “Mirror Worlds” (1991) where he outlined a vision of a future when “You will look into a computer screen and see reality”. Seven years later, then U.S. Vice-President Al Gore outlined his vision of a “Digital Earth” (Gore 1998) which became the benchmark 'vision'. now it seems clear that many of the elements of what these two visions articulated have become reality. Definitely in terms of information management and infrastructures, but also getting closer to move away from a desktop map metaphor to an immersive 3D virtual reality representation of the Earth.

So, for a new vision, Digital Earth 2020, we'd have to think about how recent and emerging technologies and behaviors will contribute. Clearly, the cloud computing paradigm will be instrumental to offer device independent services, and social networking has demonstrated a radically different way to think about data use, production, and analysis - users become producers in VGI and users become analysts in VGA (Volunteered Geographic Analysis, see post above), just look at the protein folding example from last fall. In that context, I maintain that gaming technology and similar simulation platforms will become an essential part of next generation digital earth solutions.

As a way to prescribe attrictive developments, activities like CityOne (mentioned in a previous post) could be embedded in a real data context, allow live data feeds from all types of sensors and mix simulation, what-if scenarios, with individual decisions with a potential to scale into massive multi-user environments doing agent based simulation with real human agents as part of the model, blurring the boundaries between human and machine agents.

The Digital Earth of 2020 will work as a switch-board space for interfacing with the real and the represented world.  A person will use DE-20 to interact with the real world through the digital representations of historic, real-time, and simulated projections of the world to be. Through immersive technology “different place” interactions will become “same place”, you can interact in your place with remote friends through virtually present avatars, and in the reverse, travel places with your avatar and become immersed in those places. See this Microsoft demo  from last year to get a glimpse of what I talk about (they haven't done the avatar yet as far as I know).

Most importantly though, I think the next generation Digital Earth will have to be a cross-cutting venture, across professions and other domains. It should be formed as a trans-disciplinary dialog, not just from a GIS, Comp. Sci. or Remote Sensing perspective, but embrace ideas and approaches in the social sciences, humanities and the arts. All who feel engaged in this development should make sure to invite and bring in riends that are not so engaged and communicate these ideas and extend the invitation to them. Let's build our real and mirror world together!

GIS-based games rising

Finally there seems to be several initiatives underway to combine the power of GIS and Gaming together. This year's GeoDesign meeting had several speakers mention games as a potential for simulation of policy or design scenarios.

MITAR Games is a current project at the MIT Step Program http://education.mit.edu/projects/mitar-games that take augmented reality into the hands of teachers and students.

Another interesting AR platform is provided by Layar. This company based in the Netherlands provides a development platform for mobile devices and all kinds of fun, serious, useful, and weird augmentation is featured in their layer catalog,  400+ layers in the U.S. Still, playing pacman in real life, running around the streets of Columbus and being chased by those monsters...not sure, but absolutely sure I want to learn & develop tools for geography education.

GeoGames and GeoDesign

The concept of GeoDesign, attributed in large part to Carl Steinitz at Harvard University, has recently been promoted as a framework for a tighter integration of geospatial technology with a design process (Dangermond, 2009). The GeoDesign concept includes at least four elements; Sketching of potential plans and designs, Spatial models that can simulate impacts of proposed designs, Rapid feedback on the effects of any proposed/sketched design, and Iteration through several alternative designs (Koncz, 2010). 

Clearly, a combination of gaming and GIS software has the potential to deliver most if not all of that functionality. This switch to a more design-oriented cartography and its implications for the traditional cartographic process is significant but has been recognized for a while by cartographers. The gaming/modeling approach to design is typically concerned as much about the function of each object in a level/map as they are with appearance and aesthetics. In contrast, a cartographer usually consider already existing objects and abstracts these to an object geometry that only sometimes also relate to its function in the context of the map. The GeoDesign approach takes cartographic design beyond the careful selection of visual variables to portray a world that is, to the purposeful creation and design of a world to be. 

If you care to watch my GeoGame presentation at the 2010 GeoDesign Summit it is here, 

with transcripts and all. More videos of much more accomplished speakers at this event can be found on the GeoDesign Summit website. 

The wider picture..

OK, so this is really tangential to this blog but I figured that anyone looking at this can see the connection (it's towards the end :-). This is my commentary from yesterday's panel session with Alec Murphy here at OSU Geography, as part of the Geography Awareness week. Dr. Murphy presented the NRC report on "Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences" and I was asked to comment on some portions of it, so here goes...

"I want to acknowledge the entire group of students in my Cartography seminar this and previous years, and particularly James Baginski, Jay Knox, and Xining Yang, for providing lots of inspiration and material for this commentary. And excuse me for being very positivist, but this is truly an exceptional time to be a cartographer and geographer, so I can't help it!

As evidenced by this report, where each chapter contain information graphics, and many maps, visualization is key to communicate and understand our world. But the report also challenge us to think of better ways to observe, analyze, and visualize a changing world. This vision is not new. About ten years ago, then vice-president Al Gore outlined his vision of a Digital Earth and TWENTY years ago, Yale professor David Gelernter wrote a book called “Mirror Worlds” where he wrote:

'...someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital – will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand  places. This Mirror World you are looking at is fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables. It is infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.', and he went on to say...'Mirror worlds will transform the meaning of 'computer'.” (Gelernter 1991, 1)

 It is clear by now that many of the elements of what these two visions articulated have now become reality.

The idea that our real world is reflected in a 'mirror' representation is taking shape in front of us, and because of us.

Research on games goes mainstream?

I was intrigued to see the NYTimes Science section this morning with '...prognostications for science in 2011 from 10 leading figures...'one of which is Jane McGonigal, featured below and visiting our campus TODAY! so cool. She mentions a really nice GeoGame platform called GROUNDCREW - http://groundcrew.us/



I guess the take-home is...well... maybe that gaming is now so ubiquitous/powerful that it can't be ignored by anymore who is interested in environment - society - technology relations. We (the plugged-in part of the world) are all the cartographers of a mirror world (see Gelernter 1991). We shape it through our daily activities, consciously or not. Games will be part of that cartography as we progressively mix reality with imaginary worlds, so the games will record and also help us understand our soon to be past, present and, in my opinion, also educated guesses about our future.

A musical postcard from the past with a birds-eye view

This is cool! My past gets a postcard from my future as a map of the present zooms by. You can try it yourself...
http://thewildernessdowntown.com/
It is a playful mix of personalized items, a decent soundtrack, and actually inspires some reflection on how I got here. In a way a GeoGame but very different than how I have conceived of it. Thanks to Markus Hernandez in my GEOG480 class who brought this to my attention.