Grassroots Mapping is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers used helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras.

Hand-warping tool coming soon

March 12th, 2010 by Jeffrey Warren

Some of you have seen the above screenshot on Flickr; don’t worry, we’ll be launching it soon! As some of you may recognize, we’re duplicating the ‘distort’ functionality from Photoshop, similarly to what Michal Migurski suggested last November.

Also, Chris Blow asked about how we’re dealing with very large batches of photos… well, yeah, we’ve used hugin for mass stitching… but it was so much easier to explain to people how the hand-warping interface works (i.e. “it’s like the images are made of rubber”) to non-technical participants, that for small mapping projects we wanted to use this paradigm.

Also we’ve been talking to NASA AMES about using their /Vision Workbench software, perhaps as part of a rectifying web service for folks who have large sets. So basically we’re pursuing different strategies for bulk/expert use and for novice/small-scale mapping.

From my experience in Lima, using photoshop’s distort tool (which works like the above) was actually faster than doing control point generating and stitching with hugin. But we generally only took like 20 photos max; these communities were pretty small.

One Response to “Hand-warping tool coming soon”

  1. Grassroots Mapping » Blog Archive » Hand-warper beta working – demo Says:

    […] promised in an earlier post, the hand-warping tool is online, although ‘beta’ may be a generous descriptor… […]

Leave a Reply