Tag Archives: Google

Kusam Klimb + GPS Watch + Google Earth = Kool

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Please understand that an insane mountain challenge like the Kusam Klimb is about as far away from how I’d choose to spend my weekends as…. well… anything. Fortunately one of my co-workers, Ross Collicutt, is both a sports nut and a tech geek.

Jason Gut

Me
Ross at Gutbuster

Ross

This past week was an interesting bit of synchronicity. First, Ross took advantage of a Costco sale on the Garmin Forerunner 405, a really interesting bit of sports gadgetry that gives you real time location and performance information including heart rate.

Garmin Forerunner 405

Garmin Forerunner 405

Second, Google released Google Earth 5.2 with considerable enhancements including elevation profiles and the inclusion of additional data (such as heart rate) in its GPS import function.

Google Earth 5.2

Google Earth 5.2

And third, this weekend Ross took part in the Kusam Klimb, a gnarly 23 km long trek over Mount H”Kusam near Sayward BC, featuring rugged conditions and a 1.5 km change in elevation. Make sure you check out this year’s conditions…

Kusam Klimb

Kusam Klimb in Google Earth

After completing the event, Ross somehow managed to summon up the energy to post a link to his data upload on Facebook. I have to say, Garmin’s web-based visualizer is very nice! it combines a graph, a map, and gauges in a very clear and easy to use format.

Garmin Player

Garmin Player

If you visit the activity page, you will notice that below the map you can export as TCX, GPX, and KML files. Garmin’s KML file is actually a very nice time-enabled presentation, but it doesn’t include the heart rate or speed data. For this, you need to download the GPX file. The easiest way to open it in Google Earth is to drag it into the globe window. This pops up a dialogue asking what features you want in the generated KML, and then creates a new file in your Temporary Places.

Google Earth - GPS Data Import

GPS Data Import

Now the fun begins. Of course, the obvious first step is to click on the Play button in the time menu to watch Ross run the trail…

Google Earth GPX Animation

GPX Animation

But that capability has been there for a while. What I find really interesting is the extra data that the GPX file brought along for the ride: heart rate, elevation, and speed. You can see the heart rate and speed (I think it may pull elevation from the terrain) by right-clicking anywhere on the track and choosing Show Elevation Profile. This gives you a cool interactive screen where you can display up to two variables, position your mouse anywhere along the graph, and see the information on the globe.

The Run of Ross

Ross on the Kusam Klimb

I have to admit that I have some reservations about this. The profile was very usable, but the design didn’t really fit with the rest of the Google Earth interface, and I would have liked to see all three data points (elevation, speed, and heart rate) at once. Fortunately, Google is well known for its incremental improvements, and I’m sure that it will get better over time.

Something else you can do with GPX data is create a Tour of your run and follow along with dizzying swoops and dips :) To do this, import the GPX as a linestring instead of a track, then expand the legend until you get to the Path and click on the “Play” button, and finally save the path tour.

Play the Path

Play the Path

Save as Tour

Save as Tour

You may need to play around with the Tour Settings in the Google Earth options a bit to get the correct zoom and speed, but eventually you’ll end up with something like the link below. Download the file, expand it in the Google Earth menu, and double-click on the Tour for some dorm-room-Quake queasiness:

Run Ross Run!

Whew. Time for some hard-earned relaxation! ;)

-J

Model Citizens!

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Recently, the City of Nanaimo participated in Google’s Model Your Town competition. After a call for participation by the mayor and council, a number of community members attended a training session run by Nanaimo’s Development Services and Information Technology departments. Over the next two months, Nanaimo’s team worked hard and helped grow the number of buildings in Nanaimo’s 3D Warehouse collection from 30 to 128. You can see these in Google Earth when you turn on the 3D Buildings layer.

As a result of this great collaboration between city staff and residents, Nanaimo has gained an invaluable resource. Apart from the obvious benefit of showing downtown Nanaimo off to the world, this new level of completeness gives City staff an amazing resource to use for three-dimensional planning and analysis.

Have a look at this cool movie highlighting the community’s hard work:

If the stars align correctly, I will be speaking about this experience at GeoWeb 2010 later this summer. Hope to see you there!

-J

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Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?

The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.

The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.

What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !!!!

-J

All your Base are BBOX

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You can now do some slightly fancier things with location queries in Google Base, including the good old bounding box.

I am actually a bit surprised to see this. Base has not had the kind of recognition/adoption that I figured would be required for it to get the development resources it needs (an anonymous Googler once said that the problem with Base was that I was the only one who had heard of it). They still have quite a way to go though… For instance, I need a way of uploading KML representations into a column, and of course Base needs to be swapped in as an open back end to MyMaps. :)

-J