Just Subjects

Last week I attended the OSGeo Hacking event in Bolsena, Italy. For a week developers from various Free/Open Source Geo-projects (mostly OSGeo projects) get together in a monastry near Bolsena for code sprints, cross-project discussions, presentations, enjoying italian food and more fun. I have been working on the GeoNetwork project some time, so it was good to meet and work with the GN team. Meeting project leads and developers and following presentations from other projects like GeoServer, Deegree and MapBender was really worthwhile. To get an impression you can watch the media mix I made from various photo’s/videos made by me and other participants.

Tracking the 2009-edition of the Frisian Solar Challenge, a ‘World Cup for Solar Powered Boats’, with GeoSailing. See www.geosailing.com/fsc08.

Random images from the race.

On friday march 14, 2008 Mayor Job Cohen of Amsterdam was the first player of the GamesAtelier product that Waag Society launched. We at 7Scenes have worked hard to get the software done.

links
www.gamesatelier.nl
Games Atelier officieel van start
parool.nl

At Picnic 07 we held 2 workshops using our WalkAndPlay mobile gamekit (based on GeoTracing). Here participants can Create, Play and View a GPS-based locative mobile game.
Below is one of the results from the Picnic Junior Workshop for highschools. You may also want to view the high resolution movie.

This work will be continued at 7scenes (more info soon).

(Random images taken by sailors from www.geosailing.com/svr)

During June 7-9, 2007 the Dutch Schuttevaerrace was covered live using GeoTracing in combination with Falcom Mambo GPS/GPRS tracking devices attached onboard with 15 boats. I did this project jointly with the Kenniscentrum Jachtbouw (Dennis Carton, project initiator), Grrr (Jelmer Boomsma and Rolf Coppens) and the Internet Acedemy of the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden (Frederik van der Meulen, Ronald Klooster). Except with some GPS-fixing and GPRS coverage issues and this event was a huge success.

Some screenshots.

The Start

Routes and Photo’s

Read more on www.geosailing.com.

Waag Society held a Locative Media workshop @ Sarai Media lab, Delhi, India using GeoTracing. View the video for an impression.

(Random images from bliin.com)

And another GeoTracing project: “bliin is a social networking service where users can spot, trace and share experiences — pictures, videos, audio and text — with one another in real-time on a Google Map.

bliin is currently testing in closed beta. Users you see are live and media is uploaded in real-time.”

Read all on bliin.com. While still in alpha-stage bliin already attracted press and 1000-s of visitors. Below some links to various press articles and blogs.

“Altijd te vinden via GPS”, Editie NL, RTL 4, David Behrens, 10-30-2006
“Digitale pioniers”, Elektronische Eeuw, BNR Nieuwsradio, Herbert Blankesteijn, 10-26-2006
“Op bliin kan je jezelf volgbaar maken…” Radio Online, Tros, Francisco van Jole, 10-24-2006
“Digitale pioniers?”, Ymerce, Yme Bosma, 10-23-2006
“Woophy, bliin en Bugpool winnaars…”, Digitale Pioniers Academy, Syb Groeneveld, 10-23-2006
“Drie digitale pioniers krijgen 25 duizend euro”, Bright, Tonie van Ringelestijn, 10-23-2006
“Digitale pioniers academie, de uitreiking”, SUbWAY, 10-21-2006
“Final Part of Digital Pioneers Academy”, gnispen World in Pictures, Guido van Nispen, 10-21-2006
“GeoTracing”, O’Reilly Radar, Brady Forrest, 9-14-2006

Sense of Brainport again a GeoTracing project was launched on september 21, 2006. During one week participants from Brainport were “geotracing” the region of Eindhoven/”Zuid Oost Brabant” with a mobile phone and a GPS.

During the event they could be traced in real-time on the map. While tracing the tracers are posting photos of their impressions. These photo’s are geotagged at the location taken. All their routes are stored in an archive for viewing and playback. Below are some random images (refresh this page to see new images).

Sense of the City the latest GeoTracing project was launched on april 21, 2006. During the last week of april 2006, ten civilians are “geotracing” the Dutch city of Eindhoven with
a mobile phone and a GPS. During the event they can be traced in real-time on the map. While tracing the tracers are posting photos of their impressions. These photo’s are geotagged at the location taken. All their routes are stored in an archive for viewing and playback. Below are some random images (refresh this page to see new images).

Again I had the opportunity to do a fun and technically challenging geo-project using my GeoTracing platform: developing a GPS-based mobile drawing game for the Amsterdam Museum Night. Teams would go into the city where they compete on who would (geo)draw the most beautiful “8″ by walking with a GPS and a mobile phone. They could embellish their drawings with photo’s and video’s taken and submitted on the spot. The competitive element was creativity with both the drawing and the media. All submitted media were tagged to the geographic locations where they were taken. The player’s movements, tracks and media could be followed in real-time through a webbrowser. You can view a report with video made by Bright magazine.

N8 Game Live Screen Shot (src: Bright Magazine)	N8 Game Archive Screen Shot with winner

You can view all results on www.n8spel.nl (select “archief”). This project was initiated by Waag Society. and sponsored by KPN and Geodan

Some of the submitted media

Tech Stuff – A Dense Description

The N8-game application was developed in about one month by two developers. It consisted of three main components: (1) the server (2) mobile clients and (3) a web-browser front end.

The mobile client is a Java J2ME application (Midlet) running on a Nokia 6600 communicating with a Holux GPSlim Bluetooth Sirf III GPS module. The main function of this app is to sample GPS data and transmit it to the server. Players could indicate with a button push to start (”pen-down”) and stop drawing (”pen-up”). Media were captured using the standard camera application on a Sony Z1010 phone. Media was submitted by email. The phone’s email adress is coupled to each team.

The server utilized the GeoTracing server without any modification. Basically a GeoTracing server functions as a remote GPS track-logger coupled to a Content Management System. GeoTracing is based on KeyWorx. Incoming media are tied to a player (tracer) and a tracklog and a geographic location using the date in the medium (e.g. EXIF date) or the email submit time. The GeoTracing server provides a REST service for clients to obtain tracklog meta information, (converted) media and tracklog data in an extended GPX format. This also facilitates coupling with AJAX browser-technology (see below). The server also pushes live events like user movements and other tracklog events through Pushlets.

The web-browser front-end was written using pure DHTML with Google Maps, AJAX and a Pushlet client.
Through Pushlets the browser receives real-time events like player movements and incoming media. Using the server REST service with AJAX player and tracklog info is obtained. Conceptually the browser-server interaction follows a distributed Model-View-Controller pattern with the Model on the server, the events to the View (browser) transmitted with Pushlets and the Controller function using AJAX.

(The quick link for my experiments is www.geoskating.com/gmap.)

Just a week ago I learned about the Google Maps JavaScript API. Surprising how easy it was to use and build upon. Especially for my GeoSkating project I needed a more flexible way to display routes and media on a map. So I started experimenting with the Google Maps API. In less then 5 minutes I was able to create a basic map. But I needed more. Based on a GPX (GPS track format) player from Jim Ley I built a TrackPlayer to play back skate routes. In addition the TLabel lib allows you to overlay any HTML on a Google Map. Note: also check out ka-Map. With ka-Map you can do similar things plus it is open source.

Adding layers from any WMS server

Many map servers use a standard URL-pattern based on the Web Map Server (WMS) standard.

So I wanted more: adding my own layers integrated in the map preferably with transparency. Well, this is possible thanks to work by Brian Flood and Kyle Mulka. I have created a simple JavaScript library, gmap-wms.js through which you can add your own WMS layers to a Google Map. The example above is trivial using a single transparent GIF image by faking a WMS server. All Google Maps does is requesting tiles from your WMS server (a lot of them!). In reality you will be running your own WMS server like MapServer.

See all experiments at www.geoskating.com/gmap

Opened an experimental site for GeoSailing to cover the 24 Uurs Zeilrace, the largest Dutch annual sailing event. Some 800 ships are competing on the IJsselmeer, Markermeer and Waddenzee to cover as many miles as possible within a 24 hour period. This event is held on August 26 and 27, 2005. One of the competitors will be the Semper, sailed by Dennis,Peter, Rolf and Jelmer. If it all works out the Semper can be followed live, complete with media made and submitted on the spot.

Based on the concepts and software for GeoSkating and GeoSailing I am working on a more generic framework for GeoTracing. The key idea is to provide a customizable application for live tracing, annotated mapping, GPS-based digital storytelling and location-based media for any outdoors activity.

News travels fast on the Net. My website for the mobile GPS project GeoSkating went from 10s to 1000s of visitors a day when it entered the international blogsphere and the Dutch national newspaper De Volkskrant. On Google “geoskating” went from 10 hits to 16900 in a week.. I want to thank everyone for their interest, also for the many kind emails I received. It encourages me to proceed with the project.

Webalizer Stats on June 18

www.we-make-money-not-art.com

www.engadget.com

www.100shiki.com

Volkskrant article (by Carel Helder).

www .mobilebulgaria.com

Skate en Skeeler (SBN)

GeoSkating is my latest project started in february 2005.

GeoSkating aims to automate the generation of interactive annotated skate-maps by using the Global Positioning System (GPS), Mobile Phones and the Internet. The key idea is that while skating, GPS position data is being assembled and published to a server through a mobile phone. At the same time the skater can enrich the GPS data with road surface ratings and by submitting media items like pictures. The server will draw geographic maps showing road quality through colouring plus the submitted media on the GPS locations where they were captured. In addition, skaters can also be seen moving in real-time on the map while skating!

The technical setup is globally as follows. GPS data is sampled using a standard Bluetooth GPS module. This module communicates with a mobile phone, a Nokia 6600. On the mobile phone runs a small Java (J2ME) program that reads the GPS data from the GPS module and sends it through the mobile data network (GPRS) to the geoskating.com server. The skater can enter the road quality as a number (1-5) on the phone keypad. The current quality is always added to each GPS sample sent to the server.

Since Mac OS X is already my preferred platform for Java development, I was very pleased to experience that J2ME development for MIDP 2.0 has finally become reality. I can now develop, compile, verify, package, run, debug and deploy MIDP 2.0 MIDlets from within my Java IDE (IntelliJ IDEA). All thanks to Michael Powers mpowerplayer. Best way to start is to go to developer.mpowerplayer.com and download the SDK. But there is more.

The Mpowerplayer offers the tools familiar to J2ME developers: MIDP2.0 jars, the preverify tool and a MIDP2.0 emulator. Additionally, if your Mac has Bluetooth support, you can quickly deploy your MIDLet using the OS X Bluetooth File Exchange. To automate deployment I wrote a one-line script btsend.sh that is called directly from within Ant:


#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/open -a "/Applications/Utilities/Bluetooth File Exchange.app" $1

and then from within Ant

<target name="deploy">
 <exec executable="${basedir}/btsend.sh">
   <arg line="${myproject.jar}"/>
  </exec>
</target>

The only manual action is to select your mobile device from the Bluetooth File Exchange list of devices. On my Nokia 6600 phone I receive an incoming message and the installer is run.

If you are developing Bluetooth-based MIDlets using the JSR-82 Bluetooth API you can additionally download, evaluate and acquire the Avetana JSR-82 implementation for OS X. This allows you to fully test Bluetooth-based J2ME apps from within your IDE on Mac OS X. For example, I was able to connect and test to the Delorme Blue Logger GPS

After years of tweaking with HTML tables I finally found how to vertical Centring with CSS. Found this through www.hicksdesign.co.uk.

Just watched the video stream of Steve Jobs’ keynote address for Macworld Conference. What I found the most exciting announcement is the introduction of the Mac Mini, a barebone G4 for around EUR 500,-.

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Today finally switched over to my new Linux server, an Asus Pundit-R, running Debian Sarge

I acquired an Xbox at Dixons for EUR 199,99 (ok, leave the 1 ct to Bill I said at the counter). Sometime later I had an almost complete home entertainment center/multimedia jukebox playing all my audio files (mp3, wav, ogg,..) , shoutcast streams, video files (mpg, avi, divx, and even quicktime) and photo slideshows (with background music) with a remote control on the TV-set in the living room from my Linux server in the attic. Plus offcourse I can play regular audio/mp3/video CDs and region-free DVDs.
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