Simon’s Blog

This Saturday it was so sunny and pleasant outside we decided to visit the cherry blossoms in DC. We drove to the metro station which was thoroughly packed, when the train pulled up it was packed too, even though there is only one station before us. At each stop more and more people packed in, the crowd was full of murmurs about cherry blossoms.

The metro ride was worth it because the cherry blossoms were beautiful. We were lucky enough to run into a badass peditaxi rider (a bicycle with a two person carriage attached). He took us from the Tidal Basin to the White House in only a few minutes, weaving through cars and once or twice on the wrong side of the road, it was awesome.

This is my second HD YouTube video. I used Path Tracker, an iPhone 3G application to track our movements for over two hours. Below is the raw GPS data from Path Tracker.

While I was happy with the GPS data I recorded during my previous post, I couldn’t help but think that the rich data I had for each point was going to waste. I wanted to use the time stamp to animate my snowboarding track. I also wanted to colorize the track according to the speed I was going. Fortunately, I was able to export my path from Pathtracks.com in a GPX format, which I was then able to convert to an animated, colorized Google Earth file with GPSVisualizer.com. I then uploaded this Google Earth screen capture to YouTube (my first HD YouTube video):

Click here to watch in HD

We have completed editing the video we shot in Colorado.  We also used Google Earth to create some 3D renders.  Outputting a working video from Google Earth turned out to be extremely difficult, as Google Earth produces very large and incompatible video files.

Mountain Biking

Mountain Hiking

This is a tour of a 3D building of Evolver in Google Earth. The intro animation was made in flash, then overlaid over a Google Earth video render with Adobe Premiere.

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