What happens when you merge art, science, volunteers for an experiment, GPS, a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) device, cameras, Greenwich and Google Earth? An emotion map of people living and working and what they see and feel. This is one of the most amazing multifaceted applications of Google Earth I’ve seen yet!
I found this last night through this blog entry. The blog called the Westcombe Society says it is a local amenity group which aims to foster community spirit and protect the character of the area between Greenwich Park and other nearby areas. Apparently they have a very innovative sub-committee which produced the emotion map. They have created the emotionmap.net web site which describes the progress and provides the Google Earth network link of their emotion map 
. The key to the project is the Biomap Device which allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The volunteers also use a GPS, a digital camera, and somehow take notes of their feelings at particular points as they move about the environment of Greenwich, England. It’s nice that Greenwich has particularly high resolution aerial photos in GE.
Once you load the emotion map , you will see a lot of information. You are seeing all the data for a dozen or so people. The camera icons show the photos they have taken, if you tilt the view you see the “graphs” in different colors showing the emotion indicators for each participant. You can reduce the clutter by going to the Places area and right clicking the main folder “Greenwich Emotion Map” and selecting “Hide Contents” (this turns off everything). Then I suggest you select a particular person and turn on their photos and Bio Mapping Walks. You can also turn on all the waypoints. As you turn on each person, you can follow their Emotion map. Amazing! Digg it!
(By the way, they used RoboGeo to merge the GPS, photos, and maps.)
Network Links
Follow Steve Fossett/Global Flyer in Google Earth
Steve Fossett departed yesterday in his attempt with the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer to break the record for the longest distance flight in history. Now, thanks to the efforts of the guy who has been doing the network link for the Volvo Ocean Race, we have a way to track Steve Fossett’s flight around the world using Google Earth. The position updates about every five minutes, you can click on the icon to see his current speed and altitude as well.
Here’s the official web site for the Steve Fossett attempt. And here’s the post where ‘lucifer666’ posted his network link. By the way, this would have been posted earlier today, but I was doing my own “long distance” flying in a Cessna Skylane from St. Louis back to Raleigh today.
Pilot World-wide Weather in Google Earth
The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Research Applications Program (RAP) (a US Government program) has released a prototype for showing weather data used by pilots for use in Google Earth. The weather data, known to pilots as METARs, report weather conditions at airports including winds, atmospheric pressure, clouds, temperatures, and basic weather (rain, snow, fog, thunderstorms, etc.). The NCAR network link updates directly from the database which comes from Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) [this is the government, they have acronyms for everything]. This weather data is really for pilots, most non-pilots will find the data cryptic.
Once you download the NCAR weather network link you will see icons indicating current weather at over 3000 airports around the world. A legend is shown at the top of the screen showing what the icons mean. If you click on a particular airport, you get more details on the weather for that airport. The data in GE is automatically updated every 3 minutes. The ADDS data is used by pilots at their official site weather.aero which is quite useful to pilots (I’ve been using ADDS for years now). Also, you can check out the satellite or aerial photos in Google Earth for getting to know the airport before you land there. Here is the post by the NCAR specialist who is responsible for the application at the Google Earth Community.
This is actually a quite useful tool for pilots. I just made a trip from North Carolina to St. Louis and being able to quicly check conditions at nearby airports was good verification for the weather I get from normal official sources.
Earthquake Monitoring
Earthquakes are happening around the world all the time, we just can’t feel all of them. The US Geological Survey (USGS) is constantly monitoring the Earth with sensitive instruments and for some time now has offered ways of sharing their data on the web through their Earthquake Hazards Program. In addition to RSS feeds, they introduced Google Earth KML network links which allow you to continuously monitor the status of earthquakes around the world. You can zoom in and look at the areas in the detailed satellite or aerial photos of GE. But, since most of the photos in GE are one or more years old, you won’t see evidence of that recent quake.
You have two main options off the USGS Earthquake Hazards page, plus a third option I found for just bigger quakes:
- Magnitude 1+ earthquakes, colored by age
- Magnitude 1+ earthquakes, colored by depth
- Magnitude 2.5+ during past 7 days
This is real-time data which can help you determine whether that shaking you felt really was a quake. One Google Earth Community member wrote how he experienced the earthquake data first-hand.
Real-time Shuttle Bus Tracking in Google Earth
One of the PhD students at Johns Hopkins University’s Wireless Communication Lab contacted me to let me know they have been experimenting with wireless location and network connectivity technology. They have an interesting project in which they are providing wireless Internet access while simultaneously tracking the position of 6 shuttle buses (more buses on the way).
[NOTE: the buses only operate between 1700 and 0300 EST – New York – time – so don’t expect the buses to move except during those hours.]
You can watch the buses move in real-time by downloading the JHU shuttle bus network link . (The network link may give you an initial “Netork Link Fetch” error message. Just click the “Ignore” button if this happens.) The bus positions update automatically every second. The JHU area is in high resolution aerial photography, so you can see a lot of detail on the bus locations. If you watch the Places folder for the bus placemarks you will notice the speed the bus was last moving. If you were on the bus with your laptop, you could load up Google Earth and track yourself!
The JHU Wireless Communication Lab Shuttle Bus web site explain more about the project. There is also a web site explaining the details of the mesh network layout and how they set up the antennas. Thanks to Herb Rubens who brought this to my attention. He assures me the server can handle the load for those of you checking this out. (Digg it)