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Frank Taylor of the always-informative Google Earth Blog has blogged about this great image of a U2 Spyplane, captured in-flight on Google Earth! Who is watching who, now? :-) Click the images to open this location in Google Earth.

Hope everyone had a good holiday and New Years break, we are just settling back in here at the lab so for a quick morning post take a look below at the tilt-shift movie of Barcelona by joja:


Tilt-Shift Barcelona from joja on Vimeo.

The clip covers 9 minutes consisting of 1884 photographs - that's 198 images a minute.

We do like these tilt-shift city images, soon as time allows we will feature some of London along with the obligatory 'How-To'.

Its good to be back....

Location: Vienna, Austria Photographer: Thomas Rauscher Event: Sustenance

Location: Tallinn, Estonia Photographer: Andrei Bodrov Event: Gardens

While the state of the art of Panoramic Photography has progressed in incredible ways over the last few years, there is still one type of photography stitching that is still a kind of black art: multi-viewpoint “planar” panoramas. Think of an image of all the facades on a street - while it seems simple to [...]

Location: Waikane Valley, Hawaii, USA Photographer: Norman Shapiro Event: Sustenance

Location: near Zion Lodge, Zion National Park, Utah, USA Photographer: Roger Howard Event: World Heritage

Location: North Adams, Massachusetts, USA Photographer: William M. Delabarre Event: Beginnings

Location: Casa Grande, Arizona, USA Photographer: James N Perdue Event: Atmosphere

Its that time of year again and we going to be taking a few days off from blogging. Its been a busy 12 months with the blog reaching over 1000 posts and heading towards 3000 subscribers. As such we would like to take this chance to wish all of our readers a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Over the holiday period we will be blogging on and off but for at least the next few days its time to kick back, pour a glass or two of wine and enjoy a bit of time out of the city.

Happy Christmas from digital urban....

click to open fullscreen panorama.

Despite the continuing warming of the globe there´s still snow in La Colmiane, France

Location: Lisbon, Portugal Photographer: Christian Wolf Event: Best of 2007

This thing is absolutely worth of exploring… Read more

Panoramas like this one, by Dieter Kik, remind me why I became so obsessed with VR Photography in the first place. click to open fullscreen panorama. Great work, Dieter. :-)

Location: King St. W. & Duncan St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada Photographer: Roberto Portolese Event: Gardens

Visualising geographic information above and beyond the normal export from your favorite GIS package is often left as a mere after thought. We are just starting to look into using Adobe After Effects to liven up a slightly dry dataset - UK Population represented as a point per 200 people.

Its early days and we were unsure to publish this one or not but that's what a blog is all about so below is our first go at After Effects using lights to get across a picture of Britain's population:


Visualising Data: UK Population One Light per 200 People from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Add in some camera tracking, smooth out the moment, provide some labels beyond the standard iMovie fare and we might be onto something... (?) - The movie is best viewed fullscreen.

The slightly misjudged music is by a rather good unsigned band - Lemonade Joe.

Via the Google Earth Blog - Google has added an astonishing quantity of 3d building - with photographic textures - into Google Earth. Simply fly to NYC in Google Earth, and turn on the 3d buildings Layer. Pretty amazing :-)

We have been oddly quiet on the blog about the CityEngine, mainly due to a slight melt down in the lab of our windows machines. As such we are overjoyed by the release of the CityEngine for the Mac by Procedural Inc.

Featured below is a city based on the Apple Logo:



The CityEngine is one of the most powerful tools currently available for the creation of urban environments. Of note is its ability to import OpenStreet map data allowing a 3D road network to be quickly and easily developed.

The movie below illustrates the construction of a fantasy city:



Finally below illustrates the rebuilding of Rome:



We hope to set aside a few days in the new year to take a close look at the CityEngine - you can download a 30 day demo direct from Procedual.

We have always been big fans of augmented reality here at digital urban, simply because it is so easy to set up yet a very impressive and powerful visualisation technique. As such the ability to export direct from Google SketchUp via the new plugin ARplug-in from the Development Lab of Inglobe Technologies, into a physical space has huge potential - see the movie below:



All you need to make ARplug-in work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software.

For optimal functionality, a Dual-core PC with a standard graphic card for 3D videogames are recommended, see AR-media for full details and download.

A free demo version is available with the full version coming in at 99 euros.