Virtual Worlds

I heard and interesting speech from Keith Clarke in the geography department about moving toward the next generation of GIS. It would be like Google Earth, but 100 times better. It could be used as a full fledged GIS, fully three dimensional, incorporated data from any different source including terrestrial HDS scanning, be user friendly, etc... I have thought a lot about what is possible already in a GIS using the power of spatial databases, the web, and Google Earth. Basically, if you are an agency such as Caltrain or Metrolink (the two companies I worked for), you could have all the info there in one location, and be able to pull up all the surveys, engineering data, photos, utilities, property info, and everything else about every piece of your track. I created a MySQL database that was not spatial to manage our survey data, and it worked great. Only I used it pretty much since it was a prototype, but the power to create something useful using this model is very real. It was so frustrating that my old company, RSE, was never willing to let me try anything real, and put me in contact with people to produce some real products using Google Earth to visualize their data.
Here is something innovative for you:



It's the things like that video that get me excited about the true power of what technology is going to allow for us to do. Unfortunately, I feel that you have to have massive insight and money in order to design things that cool. It is the intelligence agencies and the gaming industry that is constantly pushing these innovations, and GIS is left somewhere back in the dust trying to catch up. Granted I feel like I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but this blog is just to express my opinion. I'm not that much of an expert in anything, except perhaps surveying.
Computers and technology do exactly what you tell them to, and so are extremely limited in their abilities because most things that have been developed require some serious investment and mostly potential return on investment. Why doesn't my Android phone have a decent GIS data collection application? Why can't it sync with publicly available GPS reference stations to receive a corrected position to retrieve more accurate locations, whether it be real time or post processing? If I had a year I could probably write a halfway decent program that would at least take care of the data collection part. The post processing will come in time as technology advances. CORS and the SOPAC system have a long way to go, but hopefully in another 10 years, any GPS device such as my phone will locate a position within a few feet if that's what you want. We need more Keyholes in this world that have innovative ideas and advance spatial knowledge. We need more awareness about the world to educate people about issues such as climate change. If Clarke builds his GIS I have the potential to be true amazed by the new power to visualize spatial data. The incorporation of terrestrial scanning into a 3d visualization will add such a lifelike component to what is possible that it would be amazing what you could do with that data.