Bringing NearMap to WorldWind

I promised myself I will do this soon and it has been a month or so since I thought about it. NearMap provides a nice Google like URL resource to pull tiles from and WorldWind provides 3d perspective (since admittedly the NearMap elevation is strange at times). The projection is not quite right in the on-the-fly transform from Google Projection to LatLon, I am using the Mercator projection built-in worldwind. Anyway enough talk screenshot time. Here are couple of Microsoft Bing Maps vs NearMap. I hope I will do the maths for the 900913 projection right soon and fix up the little inconsistencies.

Talking to butterflies - over Adelaide

I finally got a bit of soldering done and serial comms with the AVR Butterfly established. I like it since it is cheap and the LCD provides other means of debugging than the serial console on the microcontroller. In production it can run off a buttoncell providing nice option for backup power and recovery if LI-PO's run out of charge.

In other news Nearmap has done it again and delivered the multiview mosaics + terrain over Adelaide from Boxing Day. This one features much better consistency and great attempts at vertical building facade mosaics. The algorithms still need some improvement to produce stunning results. Adelaide does not have many tall buildings, errors will be worse in Sydney or Melbourne.

Nearmap - Dense observation of space-time

Nearmap has finally had its public data release. Nice slippy maps view and you would expect in any web 2.0 mapping site. The biggest difference is you can make the time slip in addition to space - every capture date has a separate set of vertical and oblique views as well as separate stereo elevation model.

As with any large automated system e.g. Google the onus is on the users to find anomalies and QA the huge volume of data.

 

There are indeed some anomalies in the non-vertical modes over Adelaide. I hope they will take user feedback and improve the processing flow fulfill the great promise of recent aerial, elevation and city models this system holds.