Home, after a rather enjoyable event 
The coffee was good, and the food excellent. The presentations ranged from reasonably to very interesting. And at the end, a chap demonstrated a remarkable piece of geodata visualisation software. It allows you to fly around and zoom in on the whole of the UK, with incredibly accurate terrain data from the British Geological Survey (it was originally developed for their purposes). You could texture-map data like soil and rock types onto the surface instead of having it coloured in. Or you could use photographic data to 50cm resolution - they also have 12.5cm resolution photography, but "it won't fit on my laptop," the bloke explained.
You can draw a kind of curtain between arbitrary points and get an instant profile of the terrain between them, including an indication of the line of sight and whether or not you can, in fact see one from the other or something would be in the way.
And you can go down and look at underground features - in this case, hundreds of boreholes under Nottingham, with depth and waterline of each indicated, as you fly around in space under the city
You can also include models to arbitrary levels of detail - he showed us around a power station in Wales, where you could zoom in on the accurately-modelled yellow hard hat of an overall-clad worker holding a clipboard stood on a gantry. And from there we zoomed out and flew in a second up to Loch Ness. Zooming in on the middle of the loch, there was a rather ferocious monster poking its head out of the water
Apparently he's demonstrated it to audiences in the US a lot, and when he mentions Loch Ness (which is part of the demo because of its interesting geology) the Americans always start prattling about the monster. So he put one in there, just to keep them happy
All in all, very cool indeed
The coffee was good, and the food excellent. The presentations ranged from reasonably to very interesting. And at the end, a chap demonstrated a remarkable piece of geodata visualisation software. It allows you to fly around and zoom in on the whole of the UK, with incredibly accurate terrain data from the British Geological Survey (it was originally developed for their purposes). You could texture-map data like soil and rock types onto the surface instead of having it coloured in. Or you could use photographic data to 50cm resolution - they also have 12.5cm resolution photography, but "it won't fit on my laptop," the bloke explained.
You can draw a kind of curtain between arbitrary points and get an instant profile of the terrain between them, including an indication of the line of sight and whether or not you can, in fact see one from the other or something would be in the way.
And you can go down and look at underground features - in this case, hundreds of boreholes under Nottingham, with depth and waterline of each indicated, as you fly around in space under the city
You can also include models to arbitrary levels of detail - he showed us around a power station in Wales, where you could zoom in on the accurately-modelled yellow hard hat of an overall-clad worker holding a clipboard stood on a gantry. And from there we zoomed out and flew in a second up to Loch Ness. Zooming in on the middle of the loch, there was a rather ferocious monster poking its head out of the water
Apparently he's demonstrated it to audiences in the US a lot, and when he mentions Loch Ness (which is part of the demo because of its interesting geology) the Americans always start prattling about the monster. So he put one in there, just to keep them happy
All in all, very cool indeed
RAABA*
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