“Technology solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. But it gave no warnings about the danger of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly, the long range result – information chaos.”
“The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences.”
—Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992)http://cadmaps.com/gisblog/
Open Sensor Web - can smell be far behind? Some thing special for all your GEM types...
WMS from Bing... about time?
XML in GIS
Silverlight 5 Beta was released into the wild at MIX 11 a couple of weeks ago. This is a big step for mirror land. Among many new features is the long anticipated 3D capability. Silverlight 5 took the XNA route to 3D instead of the WPF 3D XAML route. XNA is closer to the GPU with the time tested graphics rendering pipeline familiar to Direct3D/OpenGL developers, but not so familiar to XAML developers.
The older WPF 3D XAML aligns better with X3D, the ISO sanctioned XML 3D graphics standard, while XNA aligns with the competing WebGL javascript wrapper for OpenGL. Eventually XML 3D representations also boil down to a rendering pipeline, but the core difference is that XNA is immediate mode while XML 3D is kind of stuck with retained mode. Although you pick up recursive control rendering with XML 3D, you lose out when it comes to moving through a scene in the usual avatar game sense.
From a Silverlight XAML perspective, mirror land is largely a static machine with infrequent events triggered by users. In between events, the machine is silent. XAML’s retained mode graphics lacks a sense of time’s flow. In contrast, enter XNA through Alice’s DrawingSurface, and the machine whirs on and on. Users occasionally throw events into the machine and off it goes in a new direction, but there is no stopping. Frames are clicking by apace.
Thus time enters mirror land in frames per second. Admittedly this is crude relative to our world. Time is measured out in the proximate range of 1/20th to 1/60th a second per frame. Nothing like the cusp of the moment here, and certainly no need for the nuance of Dedekind’s cut. Time may be chunky in mirror land, but with immediate mode XNA it does move, clicking through the present moment one frame at a time.
Once Silverlight 5 is released there will be a continuous XNA API across Microsoft’s entire spectrum: Windows 7 desktops, Windows 7 phones, XBox game consoles, and now the browser. Silverlight 5 and WP7 implementations are a subset of the full XNA game framework available to desktop and XBox developers. Both SL5 and WP7 will soon have merged Silverlight XNA capabilities. For symmetry sake XBox should have Silverlight as apparently announced here. It would be nice for a web browsing XBox TV console.
WP7 developers will need to wait until the future WP7 Mango release before merging XNA and Silverlight into a single app. It’s currently an either/or proposition for the mobile branch of XNA/SL.
From a mapping perspective the fun begins with this solar wind sample. It features all the necessary models, and shaders for earth, complete with terrain, multi altitude atmosphere clouds, and lighting. It also has examples of basic mouse and arrow key camera control.
Fig 4 – Solar Wind SL5 XNA sample
This is my starting point. Solar Wind illustrates generating a tessellated sphere model with applied textures for various layers. It even illustrates the use of a normal (bump) map for 3D effects on the surface without needing a tessellated surface terrain model. Especially interesting is the use of bump maps to show a population density image as 3D.
My simple project is to extend this solar wind sample slightly by adding layers from NASA Neo. NASA Neo conveniently publishes 45 categories and 129 layers of a variety of global data collected on a regular basis. The first task is to read the Neo GetCapabilities XML and produce the TreeView control to manage such a wealth of data. The TreeView control comes from the Silverlight Toolkit project. Populating this is a matter of reading through the Layer elements of the returned XML and adding layers to a collection which is then bound to the tree view’s ItemsSource property.
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