The JimH Blog

Ryan, ode to Ryan Larkin, wins Oscar

The National Film Board of Canada nearly owns the animated short category outright, and won again last night with Ryan. Watch it here to see why. This is amazing filmmaking. Note, you can right-click and zoom to full screen.

The view from Space

I'm totally obsessed by the satellite image technology from keyhole.com. They have collected enough images to cover the planet (well, the planets, Earth and Mars) and have more-or-less seamlessly stitched them together so it looks contiguous. Then you get to zoom in on the location of your choice, and adjust your tilt angle to get the view you want.

Better than that, if you select a series of locations, you can smoothly fly from one to another.  Short hops feel like you’re in a helicopter. Longer hops feel like you’ve been abducted by aliens and are seeing the world from the perspective of a high-speed UFO.

Here are some images. See this photo album for slightly larger images, or click the thumbnails below for even bigger ones. Make sure you expand them to full size to see the most detail.

Here’s where I work.

This view of my office shows the tilt function. You can see Mt. Rainier in the background. The software knows something about elevations. Not every building is 3-D but the basic terrain rises and falls correctly and then the satellite photo is textured on. The reason it looks a bit like a video game is that video games use the same technique.

Sometimes this works better than others. The tilt on this image is from the wrong angle relative to what the satellite actually saw, so the buildings look strangely artificial.  For most of my career, I worked in one or another of the six X-shaped buildings on the right.

Sometimes the tilt views are very convincing. This shot of Port Townsend doesn’t look as artificial.

This image of my old neighborhood in Vancouver shows the view I might have had from a non-existent 100-story building behind my house.

What I can’t show you in this blog is the incredibly smooth animation. If you have a fast machine and a high-end nVidia card, it’s truly amazing.