Mark Brown's Web Platform Blog : UltraCam

Tech Ed Interview with Carl Franklin

mjbrown — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:15:46 GMT

Hey everyone. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Been a little crazy for me lately getting everything ramped up for our upcoming release of Virtual Earth which is due here very very soon.

When we were all at Tech Ed North America in Orlando, FL this past June I sat down with Angus Logan, Dr. Neil and Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks! fame for a little interview. We covered a bunch of stuff including our upcoming Virtual Earth release which will feature v1 of our Virtual Earth Web Services. Our recent CTP release of the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control, our UltraCam, 3D models as well as a bunch of other Windows Live Platform services including Messenger, Silverlight Streaming, etc.

We also go into excruciating detail into the definition, exploration and proper usage of the word, “Chuffed”.

Enjoy !!!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,Windows Live,TechEd,UltraCam

Purchase UltraCam Images for Offline Use

mjbrown — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:47:42 GMT

We’ve recently opened a reseller channel to offer our high-resolution UltraCam imagery for offline applications.

Why is VE licensing imagery for offline use?

Our hi-resolution UltraCam ortho imagery is prized for GIS, urban planning, engineering and other applications that are often performed in offline desktop environments, yet our existing VE offerings prohibit any offline use of our data. By offering our data in an offline mode, we complement our online VE web service offerings and increase Microsoft and VE brand awareness worldwide.

How is this Being Done?

Our resellers, MapMart.com and i-cubed LLC will host the data and provide sales, marketing and fulfillment services, and both are just now bringing the VE data portal sites fully online. Both are top-notch companies with proven leadership in the geodata markets, and we’re excited to have them lead our channel sales.

What’s Available and Who Needs it?

Currently we have over 200 cities of color airborne imagery collected at 6” nominal resolution, averaging less than two years old. The 6” spatial resolution rivals any large-scale commercial source today, and our newest processing techniques produce ortho mosaics with almost no building lean in the image- invaluable for unobstructed views into areas with tall buildings, etc. As Microsoft acquires and processes imagery for more cities around the world, the archive is expected to grow substantially. This imagery is invaluable for urban planners, GIS analysts, and the prosumer geospatial market. We expect municipalities, engineering firms, emergency response agencies, and utilities to be core customers.

PS: I checked and we are holding off on onboarding any new resellers for the next 6 months so for all of you who want to be resellers just hang tight.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,UltraCam

Behind the Maps – Flying the UltraCam

mjbrown — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:41:20 GMT

Hey everyone. So I’ve published our second episode in our series, Behind the Maps - The Technology of Virtual Earth, on Virtual Earth out on Channel 9. In this episode, Flying the UltraCam we go to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, home of Keystone Aerial Surveys, one of the companies that flies the UltraCam that captures the imagery you see in Virtual Earth today.

Throughout we’ll interview a number of the people who work with this camera including Ken Potter, Executive Vice President and Neil DiFranco, Project Manager at Keystone. Neil, who himself is a Survey Pilot, will show us how they do flight planning with an aerial camera which is very different than what a regular pilot does and will demo the software they use to do it. Later Neil will take us on a flight and we’ll meet Ben Miller, one of their operators who will talk about how the UltraCam and the flight management software work together. He’ll show us all the steps during the flight and show us the UltraCam in action! After our flight we’ll meet David Day, Director of IT for Keystone, who will walk us through what happens to the imagery when it gets back on the ground and how they process it before it is sent to Boulder for the next step in its journey and the subject of our next episode.

This was a really fun video to make. Generally I like to keep these videos as simple as possible and if I can do the entire thing in one take. This one was different. There is a TON of content we cover and I probably should have made this into three separate videos. But seeing as this is the internet age and everyone wants everything right now I decided to make it into one long video. It runs nearly an hour but I promise there is a ton of great information on the UltraCam and we go into deep detail on each step in how it is used to capture the high resolution aerial imagery. What you also may not realize is there is a bunch of technology that goes into the flight planning, the operation of the camera and the flight software in the air and the post-processing of the imagery. I think you’ll find this episode fascinating and I do hope you all enjoy it.

Behind The Maps - Flying the UltraCam

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,UltraCam,Channel 9

New Video Series, Behind the Maps – The Technology of Virtual Earth

mjbrown — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:06:14 GMT

Hey everyone so I’ve finally published the first episode of Behind the Maps out on Channel 9. This video series will take you on a journey where we will follow the path the data and imagery in Virtual Earth takes from the manufacture of the camera, to the capturing of imagery in an airplane, to the processing of that imagery, to the Virtual Earth platform and 3D control that delivers all of this data and imagery straight to your browser.

Our first episode takes us to Graz, Austria home of the UltraCam, our high-resolution aerial image camera. We meet Dr. Michael Gruber, inventor of the UltraCam and Bernhard Reitinger the creator of the UltraMap software that is used with the UltraCam camera.

Michael goes into some details about just how they built a camera that has such a high mega-pixel rate using a technique to combine 9 individual CCD’s to act like one big one and use 4 other CCD’s to handle all the color spectrum channels. Bernhard also goes into details on the UltraMap software and how it is used to manage and correct the imagery that is captured by this incredible camera. Here’s a link to the video below. I also have a nice picture of this camera here below I took at their camera laboratory in Graz. --Enjoy.

Behind The Maps - UltraCam

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,UltraCam,Channel 9

CNET article on Google Capturing 3D Data

mjbrown — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:52:44 GMT

My friends over on the Virtual Earth 3D Team today wrote a blog entry about a recent article by Stephen Shankland about a Google experiment to capture 3D data with lasers attached to ~~the heads of sharks~~ the Street View cameras used to capture their street level imagery. Actually, they thought it was funny that CNET would use a picture of Virtual Earth 3D in an article about Google. All kidding aside I'm actually curious to to see what kind of models they will generate using data at street level.

The 3D models we create for Virtual Earth use a combination of sources. Primarily though, the data used in our photogrammetric processing that creates our models comes from the UltraCam that we manufacture. Here's what one of these things looks like.

This thing is incredible, 216 mega-pixels with a panchromatic image size of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, capturing data at over 3 GBits/sec, 13 CCD's - 7 pan and 4 color (RGB + Near IR) and 14 CPU's to process the raw images and data in real-time. The data units for the camera hold 1.7TB, enough for about 4,700 images. Since they are swappable the only limitation to how much imagery you can collect is how big your aircraft is to hold these units.

Think I'll pick up a few as stocking stuffers this Christmas.

EDIT: I forgot to note that I'm flying to Austria in a few weeks. I'm going to interview the scientists that invented this thing. When I get back I'll be sure to post it up on here to check out. Should be cool.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,UltraCam,Google