Mikel Maron probably hit an important nail on the head titling his FOSS4G talk “It’s About Time for Time”.
During the last month we were producing a short animation film based on maps for a public exhibition. Working on that project was extremely interesting because for the first time we had a tool to visualize changes over time not as static calculated values (e.g. rates of change) but as dynamically changing images, as animations. Though we deal a lot with temporal aspects in our day-to-day work (spatial and regional development is all about changes over time) we found the new possibilities given by the medium film very exciting.
Rather difficult was that our audience was defined as “normal” people visiting an exhibition about a certain region. Our short film should stress and explain some important aspects of changing regional structures during the past 30 years in this particular region, within a timeframe of 10 minutes. Whereas we expected two thirds of the visitors stopping no longer than 3-5 minutes at our installation. However, developing this animation was an interesting experience and thanks to the amazing work of our graphic artist we are all very happy with the result (I’ll post a trailer here soon…).
Almost at the same time when the idea for our project was born I read that ArcGIS 9.2 comes with a built-in animation feature too (for displaying time lines). Now I’m pretty curious about how ESRI has implemented this new feature.
Google released today a new version of Google Earth supporting KML TimeStamp and TimeLines. Check the nice GPS track example in Mikel’s post to get a picture about how this works in Google Earth.
I hope they make the papers available soon and I can read some more about Mikel’s FOSS4G presentation!
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