The following example shows a visualization of time series data (lightnings of the austrian state Salzburg in 2003) using the Processing library for Java. The screenshot shows an applet which visualizes the state Salzburg as well as its environment and some actually recorded lightnings from Mai 2003. The position of the lightning impacts are converted from real world to screen coordinates to "hit" the respective point on the plane. A time slider on top of the application can be used to navigate within the data.

We are yet very comfortable with the result but certainly have many things in mind to enhance the visualization. Stay tuned!

The Call for Papers for the Geoinformatik 2012 conference, 28th to 30th of March 2012 in Braunschweig (Germany), has been extended to the 30th of November 2011. Contributions as oral presentations or posters should be submitted as abstracts (2-3 pages) in German or English. Abstracs should cover innovative research results and ideas as well as solutions of practical relevance. Please submit your contribution using http://geoinformatik2012.geod.bau.tu-bs.de/.

For further information please visit
http://www.geoinformatik2012.de

Today I tested Autodesk Photofly, a lab-project to automatically create 3d scenes out of a set of photos. I wasn't very confident before my colleague Bernd and I started but I wanted to build my own opionon about the system. My car was choosen to be the test object and I have to admit that I'm very impressed about the result.

Due to the bad weather conditions we have to hurry taking the pictures and only made 38 pictures of my car. After waiting for the pre-processing to finish, I was able to define the animation path for the 3d video (1080p!) of my car.

Here are some screenshots out of the video:

If one look at the roof and the front window one may assume a recent traffic accident, but this is certainly due to the poor amount of photos taken from the roof of the car.

All in all the result is very impressive and if we put a bit more time in taking more pictures I am pretty sure that the result would be much better.

Conclusion: Autodesk Photofly - thumbs-up!