May 06 2009

Using City Boundaries in Google Earth to categorize activity by city

So we sent a team to coordinate some installs in Santa Monica last week. Since Google Earth makes city boundaries available, it’s not hard to quantify when we were there, and how much time was spent in Santa Monica and what stops were made in neighboring cities. This takes no time at all in GPS Insight. Here’s how:

First, turn on City Boundaries, turn off roads (to make it easier to see the city boundary) and then “fly to” Santa Monica:

Santa Monica miles in GPS Insight

Then trace the outline using a Google Earth Polygon and name it “Santa Monica” and color it however you may like:

Create a Polygon in Google Earth

To be precise while tracing the city boundary, you can Zoom Down/Up, and pan around using the Pg Up/Pg Down and Arrow Keys ( Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts gives you this information) – just click all the defining points until you complete the polygon:

Create a Polygon in Google Earth

It’s up to you how accurate you want to be — 1 minute and you should be 99.9% accurate:

Create a Polygon in Google Earth

After clicking on “OK” you can then right-click/cut [or copy to be safer -- either is fine] the definition from Google Earth and paste it into “Quick Import” under Mapping -> Landmarks on the GPS Insight top navigation bar:

Import a Google Earth Polygon into GPS InsightT

Import a Google Earth Polygon into GPS Insight

Then click on “Import Now” and repeat for any bordering cities in question.

To find out which ones we need, grab the history for roughly the time that vehicle (Scion 4000) was out in California.

I forget when they were there so I’ll just grab 9 days or so toward the end of April:

Scion GPS history in Santa Monica

It looks like they spent some time driving through Venice, having breakfast in Playa Del Ray, and in WestWood, Sawtelle, Culver City, etc.

I’ll just add a couple other cities for the sake of this article, but if these were important county or city boundaries, you would only need to add them once, and if it was a LOT of data, we have ways of automating this for our customers — just ask! [sometimes that means we do it for you...]

Here are 3 I quickly traced (they’re not 100% — there are crazy in & out borders which are irrelevant for our purposes here):

CA coastal cities

Now we can group them as “CA Coastal Cities” under GPS Insight -> Mapping -> Landmark -> Groups:

Grouping 3 landmarks into one group

Click on “Create New Landmark Group”:

Group GPS Insight Landmarks

Then name it and save it:

GPS Insight CA Coastal Cities Landmark Group

Now here’s the timesaver:

Draw a quick “throw-away” polygon around all three in Google Earth and cut/paste it into “Filter by Polygon”:

Too many landmarks — filter them with a Google Earth Polygon

We quickly see only our 3 Coastal Cities — this is down from 966 landmarks we would otherwise need to look through to find all three and drag them into the new group we’ve created:

Too many landmarks — filter them with a Google Earth Polygon

Now shift-click between the top & bottom to select all 3, then drag onto our new “CA Coastal Cities” group:

Adding Landmarks to a GPS Insight Landmark Group

Now click on the “edit landmarks” icon to change if necessary or just verify the group is correct:

Adding Landmarks to a GPS Insight Landmark Group

OK, enough about grouping landmarks, but that’s necessary for the final report:

Make sure to refresh or hit F5 on your browser to pick up the new landmark group, and run a landmark report for Scion 4000 for ONLY the landmark group called “CA Coastal Cities” — make sure to click on the “Passing Through” checkbox to ensure you get driving activity which does not begin/end a stop as well.

Running a Landmark Reoprt in GPS Insight

And .6 seconds later, here is the answer:

103.8 hours in Santa Monica, 9 minutes passing through Venice, and 25 minutes in Playa Del Ray with 9 minutes stopped there for something (Breakfast? — too quick):

GPS Insight Landmark Report

Turning on the “Places of Interest” layer we see it’s a McDonald’s (which explains why it’s only 9 minutes):

McDonald’s stop during Santa Monica trip

You get the idea — this article has gotten long…

Hopefully it gives you a good example of how to use Google Earth, along with GPS Insight landmarks/landmark groups, and our landmark report.

One nice feature I’ll mention though is this — if you want to remove a particular landmark from a group because it doesn’t belong there, just click on the “minus” sign near the landmark name in the report:

Easy landmark removal from a group within the GPS Insight landmark report

You are given a chance to “OK” or cancel the deletion:

Easy landmark removal from a group within the GPS Insight landmark report

This is a great example of how our reports allow you to interact to create/delete/remove landmarks, pull up maps, etc. We are always trying to make the product more able to answer questions about your fleet, and the interface easier for you to do so efficiently.

It truly took me 3 minutes to get the answer to my initial question — but about an hour & 15 minutes to document it in this article. It’s a long one, thanks for reading it.

Thanks,
Rob.


Mar 02 2009

Zoo II — How much time at the Giraffes?

My last article detailed how I took a very small tracking device to the zoo to track my day there. Incidentally, that tracking device has been reporting every 2 minutes for the past 36 hours (I’ll let you know when its rechargeable battery finally needs recharging later).

I want to quickly illustrate how fast it is to overlay a map of the zoo (my son brought one home & I scanned it) in order to determine how much time I spent at a particular area (my daughter loves the Giraffes so we went there first).

After importing the overlay in Google Earth, we stretch it to fit the roads, lakes, boundaries, etc. This is covered in other “Overlay” subject blog articles.

We can measure (using the Pro version of Google Earth) that the zoo is roughly 90 acres:

GPS Insight overlay of the Phoenix Zoo Map

Dialing down the “Opacity slider” we can see through the overlay to the “real map” to determine the distance between the real Carousel and the map carousel — only 139 feet off. This map is not military grade but it works for our purposes. We can also see the Giraffe just above the carousel. They are my daughter’s 2 favorite things at the zoo, we start our trip with the Giraffes then end with the Carousel before we leave (and a toy from the gift shop to avoid a scene…).

Phoenix Zoo Carousel in Google Earth vs. the visitors’ map

Here we can zoom down and bring in the tracking history of our zoo visit:

Giraffe time

It is easy to see we were walking through the zoo at 13:31, then got to the giraffes at 13:33, left at 13:41, took a wrong turn finding the entrance to the Amphibian exhibit, then got inside the Amphibian exhibit at 13:45. Well, if you use our product regularly, trust me, it’s easy to see.

You can create geofences around key areas, set up automated alarms to notify someone via email/cell SMS message whenever someone goes inside those zones, and can set up automated reports showing how much time is spent over a week at the various areas of the zoo (or your business, or the companies/subdivisions which pay you for servicing them, securing them, visiting them, etc.).

Obviously I like to use “personal” non-business related examples to illustrate what can EASILY be done using GPS Insight. I hope you can draw some analogies to how to use our product in your business in order to save money/time, reduce risk, increase efficiency, and understand and investigate/defend employee activity.

Here is a “zoomed out” version of the Zoo map overlay — you can use subdivision maps, Army Maps, Farm maps, or really any overlay useful to your business as a guide to interpreting data, quantifying activity, and identifying points of interest relative to your vehicles’ or employees’ activity.

GPS Insight map overlay

Thanks,
Rob.


Jan 16 2009

Ski maps are really inaccurate (part 3 of the ski overlay series)

This is the 3rd (and last) in a series on GPS tracking of skiers, and more to the point, the overlaying of ski maps into Google Earth in order to put that data into reference. So after asking someone way better at Photoshop than me to “stretch” that ski trail map of Heavenly Lake Tahoe and make it fit Google Earth, it has become VERY clear that those maps aren’t even close to accurate.

Photoshopping the map & stretching/skewing it to fit, then overlaying the sides to be accurate, it’s still obvious that there is no real scale built into these maps. The Gondola is nowhere near reality:

GPS Insight Heavenly overlay

So we aborted the mission of overlaying this map in favor of simply recreating the runs as Google Earth “paths.”

Here is what it looks like once you add a number of “paths” and “placemarks” in Google Earth, using the map as a reference, and the satellite photo with the missing trees as evidence of where the ski runs actually are:

GPS Insight ski runs in Google Earth

The paths are color-coded based on type (typical green/blue/black difficulty based on the map) and the Gondola is in red.

If you were using GPS Insight to say, track your Snowcats (which are used to groom the runs regularly), you would be able to run reports on which runs were groomed on which days, for how many hours, etc. This is actually something we’re starting to see some interest in from some ski resorts which is part of the motivation for this exercise (if I had thought about it in advance I could have written off the trip!).

You can see how accurate this is if you take a little time to properly map the trails — We show activity skiing right along Orion, Skyline Trail, and Ridge Run (as well as us taking the lift up ABOVE Ellies — I didn’t take my 8 year old snowboarder on this black (he probably would have done better than me, actually).

Ski Runs in GPS Insight

Using a combination of a ski trail map and Google Earth with recent imagery, it is easy to see which runs particular GPS data recorded activtity on.

We’re going skiing tomorrow in Pinetop AZ at “Sunrise” park (www.sunriseskipark.com) — here’s their much more straightforward trail map.Sunrise trail map

I’m done overlaying them, I think everyone gets the point now (on to more vehicle based GPS tracking topics next!)

Thanks,

Rob.


Jan 05 2009

More GPS snowboard tracking

I realized I didn’t have much data from the prior 2 days’ skiing so I put the tracking device in 20 minute mode and you can see we have more to go on now.

GPS Insight tracks 8 year old snowboarders too

Here you can start to see the (thawed versions of) trails and where the points themselves lie:

GPS Insight tracks 8 year old snowboarders too

Next I will begin to merge the Google Earth version of the mountain with the Heavenly Ski map:

Google Earth ski map overlay vs. GPS Insight data

Since the map itself is drawn on a vertical angle, I will need to reshape it, something I need to do anyway as we’ve started working on a project of this sort for a customer. This is a relatively simple thing to do, provided you know how to do it. I don’t, so I’ve got some Photoshop reading to do…

When I figure it out, I’ll finish this overlay & make it plus the data available for you to look at in Google Earth.

Rob.


Jan 02 2009

Tracking valuable packages (or my Son on the ski slopes)

GPS Insight is working on a new line of package tracking devices. They’re geared toward placement in valuable shipments – plasma TV’s, cigarettes, bank bags, etc. The beauty of these units is that they don’t use only GPS signals to determine their location — they can use the E-911 cell phone system to VERY ACCURATELY determine their location.

For instance, I put one in the trunk of my car, drove into our covered concrete parking structure at the office, and this device knew where I was within 10 feet.

I put one in my oldest son’s (8) pocket (they’re very small, only a 1″ x 1″ x 2″) yesterday when we went skiing in Lake Tahoe on our yearly vacation. These units are typically used on a “every 4 hours or whenever I ask for a location” basis. Jack is a good snowboarder, but why not stick a device on him in case I lose him somewhere, right…?

GPSI Jack future salesguy

[BY THE WAY, we do >> NOT << sell GPS tracking devices to people for tracking their kids, spouses, lovers, whatever -- we are strictly B2B (Business to Business)]

So Jack didn’t fall down the side of some slope and get stuck where I coudn’t find him, so the only “locate” we got on him were the “scheduled” 4:30 (MST), 3:30 PM local time ones, which were both close to the top of the Gondola (which you need to be on by 4 PM to get back down). Here are the two, and you can see they’re within .35 miles of each other (yesterday we were heading back a little earlier than the previous day since he was tired out from some longer runs):Tracking Jack with GPS Insight’s package tracking unit

Here’s a picture of the mountain & where the Gondola goes from the base to the mountain:

Heavenly Gondola

So how can I really tell where those points are (or worse case scenario, where my lost kid is if necessary)?

Here is a map of Lake Tahoe’s “Heavenly” resort:

GPS Insight Heavenly overlay

I will put this map into a digital overlay in Google Earth so that we can see more easily where EXACTLY these GPS device locates were. This allows us to put “reality” on a map relative to “usefulness” — e.g. a ski trail map is much easier to use to locate someone than a map or satellite photo of a mountain.

I’ve never created a “vertical” overlay like this, so I think I’ll need to Photoshop this graphic a bit in order to stretch it to match the mountain.

This is a big enough exercise that it will be another blog article. I’ll post the link here when it’s done. I’m on vacation and the Gondola is closed due to wind, so I wrote this one article, but the next one will have to wait until I’m back to work most likely. I’ve got 3 more days in Tahoe, so I’m going to enjoy it and stop typing now.

Happy New Year !

Rob.

Tags: , ,


Oct 14 2008

AT&T coverage and GPS Insight hardware

While testing some new units today (mentioned in the previous article), we saw a couple of 1-2 minute “lags” from the time a GPS location/speed/direction measurement was taken and what time it made it to our servers over the AT&T network.

We are able to pull in exact coverage maps and “overlay” them on top of the troublesome points (1-2 minutes is still VERY GOOD, but typically points take only 2-5 seconds from the time they’re reported to the time we have them in our database for our customers’ real-time-mapping and alerts):

GPS Insight “lag” in slightly degraded AT&T coverage

You can see the highlighted times from report to receipt on the left, and the one 2 minute “lagged” point takes place right where AT&T claims only “Good” coverage — not “Best” coverage. You can tell by the lighter shade of orange.

Here is another Salesperson — David, and he had mostly 2-6 second updates, but had a couple of 1-2 minute reports. Again, the 2 minute report is right where AT&T drops from “Best” to “Good” coverage:

GPS Insight “lag” in slightly degraded AT&T coverage

You can see that the vast majority of the 1-minute-by-1-minute reports take just a few seconds to become available — the only exceptions are typically 1-2 minutes where we need to retry because the AT&T signal isn’t strong enough or we temporarily lose a connection.

This happens without our customers even noticing typically. No data is ever lost — we “Store and Forward” so that could drive to a foreign county where we don’t have coverage (Mexico for us Scottsdale-dwellers), and all that data will be forwarded up once you hit the border again.

Since we are constantly testing and building tools like this to help us test our GPS Insight tracking devices and software, I thought I would share a glimpse of how we visualize the quality of our service.

Here are a couple coverage/Store-and-Forward related articles which talk about this as well:

Finding lost vehicles using GPS Insight

GPS Insight and the US Border

Tags: , ,


Sep 01 2008

Hurricane Gustav

Category: Emergency Response,Google Earth,Overlays,Weatherrdonat @ 12:40 pm

I’m watching the news as Hurricane Gustav has begun to hit the coast, and I wondered how much damage there has already been.

Using Google Earth, I was able to pull up a picture of it by turning on “Weather” under “Layers.”

Since I can pull up all of our customers’ vehicles within Google Earth, I can see where they are relative to the storm:

Hurricane Gustav’s path

It’s obscuring my view of which vehicles are underneath it, so I can remove the clouds by unchecking them under Weather, and change the transparency of the radar image with the transparency slider:

Adjusting the Google Earth Weather Layer

Now I can better see which vehicles are in the storm right now:

GPS Insight vehicles inside of Hurricane Gustav

Thankfully all of them except 2 or 3 have been stopped for more than an hour (we know this since they are red).

One on the outskirts is moving, and when I look at the time it reported vs. the time my map refreshed, it is within 2 minutes (typically, it takes 2-3 seconds to make it into our database, and our vehicles reoprt every 2 minutes):

Still cell service in Gustav

This tells me that AT&T is still doing ok in terms of cell coverage. Once it’s over and hopefully there isn’t too much damage, we can run a quick analysis to determine if/when any of our vehicles were unable to communicate due to failures in the cell network. So far so good.

By zooming WAY down, we can actually look UP at the radar image of Hurricane Gustav — a pretty interesting view. Unfortunately, whoever is driving this vehicle has to see the real thing — I hope they are heading out of there.

I looked earlier today and an ambulance customer of our sent some ambulances to the area — hopefully everyone does ok.

Rob.

[ Update -- Gustav has dissipated to a tropical storm as of 9 PM PST.]

I ran a check against all customers’ vehicles which were driving in that area, and only one vehicle had any evidence of cell trouble with AT&T due to the Hurricane.

Vehicles tracked by GPS Insight during Hurricane Gustav

This screenshot shows a few things:

  • the Hurricane above the area in question
  • AT&T GPRS (Cell) coverage in orange on the ground (darker orange=better coverage)
  • Many vehicles’ paths, with dots close to the ground indicating 2 minute reports, mostly received by GPS Insight within seconds
  • The area in the red box shows pins “higher up” in the air, which indicates a delay from the time the measurement was taken and when it was received by us. This “lag” was up to 44 minutes, but all that data was eventually transmitted.

Most likely this “lag” was due to a single damaged cell tower in that area.

GPS Insight vehicles inside of Hurricane Gustav

Earlier in the day at 8:32 AM, it only took 6 seconds for data to get to GPS Insight from that area. But during the hurricane, at 10:33 PM, there was apparently no cell signal available in that area, so the vehicle needed to drive roughly 34 minutes until it hit a working cell tower.

However, this is the ONLY instance of apparent damage in the cell infrastructure which affected any of our customers in that region, which is great to see. And it only lasted for 30-40 minutes.

This “lag” view is something we use internally to help customers troubleshoot their vehicles (by determining if problems coincide with known AT&T coverage limits) — today it helped to show that Gustav didn’t do much damage to the cell towers in that region, thankfully.

Tags: , , ,


Nov 17 2007

Map books meet GPS Insight

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):

Map book overlay within GPS Insight

Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:

GPS Insight mapbook overlay

We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:

define map page lower left

Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:

Getting latitude/longitude data from 4 box corners

Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

  • Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
  • Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
  • Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.

Map book overlay within GPS Insight

It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:

GPS Insight polygon around map page

Here is the full polygon:

GPS Insight polygon around map page

Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:

GPS Insight vehicle tracking interface

7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:

GPS Insight polygon landmark report

map page activity

Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: , ,


Oct 28 2007

Mile Markers for Arizona Department of Transportation

We have recently begun to work with the ADOT (Arizona Department of Transportation), and were asked to incorporate mile marker data into GPS Insight for them. Of course they have this information somewhere, but in the time that it will take to get the raw data and process it into GPS Insight, we could simply create these mile markers “manually” and I thought this exercise is worth documenting on the blog.

First, I found a high resolution map of the mile markers online via Google.

Then I took a close-up screenshot of the map for the I-10 [I just traveled this last week myself so I thought we could do some interesting analysis of this data later].

Arizona Department of Transportation Mile Markers screenshot

Now I can import this “overlay” into Google Earth and use it as a template for creating the mile markers:Arizona Department of Transportation Mile Markers screenshot 2

Note that the important thing here is that the part you really want to “trace” is accurately stretched over the map — maps and Google Earth inevitably diverge, since maps are never as accurate (or spherical) as Earth. The other roads/borders will not match exactly unless you change the “keystone” using a graphics editor. It would be nice if Google would add keystone as an editable aspect of overlays in the future (keystone is effectively stretching an image more on one side than on the other).

Now that we have this image, we can create landmarks on top of each “10″ mile marker (the map only shows the “tens”).

I-10 mile marker 10 with path

Since this particular mile marker is on the edge of what I considered “accurate” (due to keystone) I measured it myself using the Google Earth Path ruler to 10 miles from the border.

Then a quick copy/paste/rename/replace of the original allows me to quickly place the next 14 “tens” mile markers, placing them on the red dots but on the road itself from Google, which is always far more accurate:

copying Google Earth placemarks

In order to move a copied/pasted landmark, make sure the original is “turned off” (otherwise you can’t “grab” the one you want to rename/remove) and then right-click it, choose properties, and then you can move it when your cursor turns to a pointing finger. Remember to change the name (from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, etc.).

Here is the final product (note I created a folder in “my places” and placed the numerically sequential points along with the overlay map):

final GPS Insight mile markers for ADOT

Then for an additional I-10 definition I will draw a rough polygon landmark around the I-10 which will help me to answer questions like “how much time do my vehicles spend on the I-10 between mile marker 0 (border) and 150 (Phoenix)?”

GPS Insight I-10 polygon border

The key to accurately defining borders around large areas is to use the “compass” area to navigate between clicking between areas. Plus you can right-click to remove your last “incorrect” points and zoom in/out, move, and pan/tilt using the mouse at the top right, since your mouse otherwise is being used to define the polygon.

creating I-10 polygon

Now we can easily find a particular mile marker by typing “ctrl-f” for find, then “I-10 40″ to instantly find/double-click that point for instant navigation:

Instantly find mile marker

And last (most importantly), you can instantly answer questions about your fleet like “How long did Rob (in the Navigator) take driving to, then back from DisneyLand last week on the I-10 in Arizona between mile markers 0 and 150?”

run GPS Insight report

We see it took me 1:50 to get TO Disneyland on the I-10 and 1:41 to get back during that same stretch of road, and that it took roughly 3 days and 7 hours from the time I left Arizona to the time I returned (since it is on the border at Mile “zero”), by running this report (which takes a split second to complete):

GPS Insight polygon report

And here is the actul trip itself along with a 6 minute stop (we were traveling with our kids…):

rest stop

You can see we made it a whopping 83.2 miles before hitting the first of what was many rest stops on our way to DisneyLand…

rest stop

And that stop was apparently at mile marker 87, 3 miles before 90, between the 80 & 90 we just created:

mile marker 87

Thanks for reading through this practical example of how to use GPS Insight and external mapping resources (ADOT mile marker maps, Google Earth, etc.), along with real GPS data to answer questions you may have about your fleet. Of course ADOT would want to answer other questions (response times to accidents in certain areas of the state, proportion of their vehicles in any one particular concentration) but having these landmarks and polygons in the GPS Insight system helps them (and all of our customers) to answer these types of questions.

Here’s the Google Earth file for you to see the results (minus my DisneyLand trip):

http://www.gpsinsight.com/tmp/ADOT Mile Markers.kmz

Rob.

Tags: , ,


Oct 07 2007

Get ready for better Satellite views…

Category: Google Earth,Mapping,Overlaysrdonat @ 11:31 pm

DigitalGlobe just launched a new satellite the other day which will really help us answer the frequently asked question “how often are the maps updated…?”

The WorldView-1 satellite was launched on Tuesday, September 18, 2007, from one of our customers, Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California. We have helped track VIP’s at their air force base in the past.

The new satellite launch is detailed Here.

Digital Globe Satellite

This will make the difference between the top of this picture and the bottom:

high res/low res picture

Currently we overlay purchased aerial photos (as we did for this Reading, PA company) using the GPS Insight “overlay” management functionality. But this satellite will hopefully reduce our need for 3rd party aerial images.It is very quick to do this within GPS Insight:

After saving the overlay to disk:

Reading overlay

Simply upload it to GPS Insight (or alternatively you can email it to us for automated inclusion in your account):

GPS Insight Overlays

Then download it to any computer using our 3-D mapping in Google Earth.

Now instead of waiting for better Google Earth imagery from this satellite, your vehicles’ locations will be more clear than this:

Old satellite imagery

Instead they will look like this:

New Satellite Imagery

Quite a difference, obviously. This photo, a 10 square mile one, cost only $30 from an aerial photo company, and helps this customer find its heavy equipment which is all over their large yard.

In reality, many major metro areas already have phenomenal aerial/satellite imagery, but this satellite will be a great help for those areas which currently don’t, or for which the imagery is out of date.

Some of our customers will be happy with the new imagery, but in the meantime we help with these overlays where necessary, & wait for the WorldView-1 to start sending down photos of your town.

Thanks DigitalGlobe & Boeing!

Rob.

Well, about 2 weeks ago I was showing a customer how we can pull in aerial photos and I used this as an example. I looked at Google’s new imagery for this area and it was BETTER than my “improved” aerial photo. This is a good practical example of how Google is constantly improving their imagery. Here are some screenshots of the NEW baseball field:

[if you're interested, it's located at lat=40.3654245916, lon=-75.9337693414]

New Google Imagery for Reading PA

Another close-up of Reading’s AAA ballpark

Thanks again Google & Boeing!

Rob.

Tags: , ,