Grassroots Mapping

These are from Beaver Country Day School’s NuVu Studio workshops, which I’m teaching this week and next. We flew today and got some great imagery of the Boston waterfront. I’ll post pictures soon.

Follow the project here: NuVu Workshop on the Grassroots Mapping Wiki

The NuVu workshop at Beaver Country Day School near Boston started today, and participants Mariah, Danielle, Hayley, and Nicky flew 3 different ‘DIY satellites’ over the school’s campus, capturing some great imagery, and assembling the map below.

Read more on Saeed’s post at the NuVu blog: “First day of balloon studio”

WhereCamp was a blast – lots of people brought kites and such, and we managed to get a pretty good set of photos of the area of the Google campus we were ‘camped’ at (almost entirely due to the expertise and kite-flying of Eric Wolf). I demoed the new Cartagen Knitter and on Saturday night a bunch of us started to knit a map together, called “Deathstar Plans“. Check it out!

Actually it was mostly them (see picture below) trying to knit, and me fielding bugs, new feature requests, and so forth… it was the first time a bunch of people had gotten together to stitch a map at the same time, each on their own laptop. The feedback was great, and I was writing code and publishing it until 3am.

You can now ‘lock’ images you’re done knitting, and the tool is quite a bit more useable. Thanks again to everyone!

We’ve had a lot of trouble with winds between 5-10 mph, where it’s not enough for a kite, but too much for a balloon… so this weekend at WhereCamp a few of us designed and built a hybrid kite-balloon, which we named Black Knight 1, made from a 99-gallon trash bag.

Sadly, after a lot of careful work, it immediately exploded! But in fact it made a pretty passable large sled kite, even after falling apart. So we learned a lot, and are moving forward on the Black Knight 1.1. I encourage anyone interested to tackle this problem, since it just takes a lot of plastic and packing tape! Basically it’s a balloon which acts as an airfoil, so that instead of a light wind pushing the balloon down onto the ground again, it provides lift and flies more vertically.

We really need an ‘open source’, easy-to-build design for a kite-balloon! Read more about the concept and upload pictures and notes from your own experiments at Helium Kite page on the Grassroots Mapping wiki.

Progress on Cartagen Knitter continues; a lot of detail-work but you can now embed maps you make on your own website with the handy “Embed” link.

Above, the Cantagallo community as mapped in January.

Cartagen warping tool demo from Jeffrey Warren on Vimeo.

As promised in an earlier post, the hand-warping tool is online, although ‘beta’ may be a generous descriptor… lots of features are still coming, please be patient! Watch the above video for an introduction.

This is basically a tool for people to upload and easily stitch together their balloon- and kite-photos. I wanted to add that it’s optimized for ease-of-use, and even for folks with limited tech literacy — we’re working on other techniques for mass warping and stitching.

Suggestions or what-have-you can be posted to the Cartagen Knitter page (yes, that’s what I’m calling it) or posted here in comments.

Coming soon: a pen tool to trace out buildings from the images you upload.

After some discussion on the mailing list, I put together this poster/handout image which shows everything you need to make a balloon or kite map (besides people!). Feel free to distribute! I’ll start printing this on the back of the print maps I make, and hopefully this will help people get started making their own maps.

Download the Full size image

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.

For grassroots mapping enthusiasts in the Bay Area, I’ll be speaking at Where 2.0 in San Jose on April 1, presenting the Grassroots Mapping Lima project and talking about our plans for future work. Afterwards, we’ll try to do a demonstration flight at the Where Faire.

Where 2.0 charges admission, but WhereCamp is a free and open ‘unconference’ and I’m hoping to do a workshop there where people can build their own rigs, do test flights, and generally do a bit more hands-on work. More on WhereCamp soon — we’re still finding out if we can fly at Google’s Mountain View campus… they’re the hosts.

Pat Coyle and I are starting work on an illustrated guide to grassroots mapping with balloons. Visit the wiki page to see our initial notes and sketches.