On Your Mark, Get Set, Go Spatial

July 28, 2008 By: Mary Jo Wagner

New Year's Day may be the time when we vow to get fit, but most of us shelve that resolution until summer, when the sun hits and we all go outside to play. Except when we're all inside, glued to our televisions or laptops, watching athletes do our sweating for us in the myriad sporting events on offer. In these competitions, spatial imagery plays a pivotal role in bringing the sights, the sounds, and the sweat directly to our screens.

Though extreme fans will tell you there is nothing better than camping out for days along one of the Tour de France routes and waiting in anticipation for their favorite rider to eventually whip by, even the non-fanatics have been able to virtually sit in the slipstream of riders for every leg of the tortuous Tour. Spectators have been treated to a taste of the Tour through Google Earth for a few years now, tilting their views to get a real sense of the killer mountain climbs and distances the riders pedal. But this year's Tour provided a heightened virtual experience through mashups that take advantage of Google Earth's Street View imagery.

Launched for the first time outside the United States, the Street View layer for France puts the observer at street level at multiple locations along each of the 20 race routes. Users can zoom into the streets via Google Earth or Google Maps. With Google Earth, viewers can turn on the street view layer, zoom into the coverage of France, and find camera icons along a race route. Clicking on a camera and following the link to the street view brings up a very high-resolution, clear shot of that slice of the course. Google Maps provided the same type of functionality in two dimensions: clicking on any camera icon on the street map or satellite view produced the relevant street view for that location.

Google Maps' Street View imagery lets those at home see the countryside that Tour de France cyclists speed past.

A mashup created by Thomas Vergouwen not only combined a Google Earth-based map with street view layers for the complete 2008 Tour course, it also allowed fans to track riders in real time.

A more enhanced mashup took that same concept of real-time tracking from the street and enabled viewers to track the exact position of their favorite racers while monitoring their heart rate, cadence, speed, and power. The 2008 Tour de France Live Tracker was created by a team at Ubilabs, a German company focused on location-based media technology, in collaboration with Schoberer Rad Messtechnik (SRM), the German inventor of the mobile "Powermeter" diagnostic tool. After the start of each race stage, the positions of all riders equipped with the SRM technology and their biometric stats would appear on Ubilabs' site, and every pedal stroke could then be followed in real time on Google Maps.

GeoBeijing

Spectators planning to watch the Beijing Olympics either in person or remotely can already start to familiarize themselves with the city and Olympic venues through the new GeoBeijing geoportal. Developed by geoinformatics Professor Franz-Josef Behr and masters student Yuan Ying, the geoportal integrates Google Maps satellite imagery overlaid with street information and points of interest such as hotels, bus routes, and railway stations to help guide visitors and remote viewers through the expansive venue network.

The developers overlaid more than 1,800 streets onto Google satellite imagery, and every one can be accessed via a street list in a side panel. Hotel locations can also be viewed in the same way, complete with photographs and links to their own Web sites. Users can zoom in and get a very close look at the Olympic venues such as the National Stadium, the National Aquatics Center, or the Beijing University Gymnasium, and additional information and photographs of the features pop up automatically.

Whether the same virtual experience as the Tour will be on offer for fans of Olympic athletes remains to be seen, but what is clear is that spatial imagery is giving the world community a sporting chance to experience the sights, sounds, and challenges of some amazing competitions.

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