Spatially Adjusted: Recent Episodes
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One of the best parts of my iPhone 15 Pro is that it has a USB-C port on it. While I appreciate the lightning port, I have just grown so tired of having to manage so many different ports while traveling. Coupled with my iPad having USB-C and my Apple Watch having a USB-C charging cable, I went ahead and got myself an Anker 3 port USB-C charger (which has a USB-A for those times you need one) allowing me to plug in all my devices at night and just use ordinary USB-C cables.
It is all nice and clean, no longer do I have all different cables for each device. My Kindle is USB-C, my GoPro is USB-C, my battery backup is USB-C and of course my MacBook Pro. I have reduced the cables I travel with because I don’t need one for each device. I do travel with a USB-A to USB-C cable for those times where the airplane doesn’t have USB-C or in an airport or rental car but that tucks away nicely in my travel bag.
But then I just realized my AirPods Pro case is lightning.
Now I could buy a USB-C case for said AirPods, but I want to wait until September and see if there is anything new. So trusty old lightning cable goes back in the bad for now.
Update: I was asked how I charged my AirPods Pro last night, well you can use the Apple Watch charger. Works pretty well but its not a great solution long term.
GIS and Topo maps go hand in hand. From the classic Quad maps, to the National Geographic TOPO! product, to just basic Esri Topo map services, these topographic maps have been part of GIS since the beginning. Google Maps has had their “terrain” layer for a long time (though it seems to be fading out for some reason). Apple with the release of Watch OS 10 and the Ultra 2 added topographical maps to at least the watch ecosystem, but still required an iPhone to download the offline maps.
But yesterday Apple finally closed that hole and added topographical maps (including the trails feature) to iOS.
Now this is very user centric at this point. I expect to see these maps start appearing in apps that use MapKit but to what extent I’m not sure. I use onX Offroad quite a bit and suspect it will continue to use their own
If there is one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t steal the ARC/INFO manual binders from one of the jobs I used to use ARC/INFO. I’ve had an eBay search going for years in hope that someone will give them up. I suspect every binder set that still exists will never be given up. It’s like owning a Picasso, you’d never sell it and ask your relatives to bury you with it.
We were talking (or typing) on Slack last week and I was asked what I thought was the single greatest software innovation while I’ve been working. A ton of things came to mind from from Apple’s HyperCard (more than anything this made me a programmer) and I even wrote a post about it back in 2006. I don’t think anything on that list is technically incorrect, but I wouldn’t put ArcView 3.x in that list anymore.
BUT, let’s get real here. Each of those software products are amazing in their own right, but I don’t think any of them really moved the needle on spatial like the one I really think impacted the trajectory of what we used to call GIS.
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Now I know what you’re going to say, why isn’t it PostGIS??? Now PostGIS has been clearly the leader since SQL Server 2008 arrived, but I believe it was SQL Server which changed expectations on paying for a geospatial database (Oracle, SDE or others). I mean I used to have Esri SDE on Oracle, I can’t even remember how expensive that was and how buggy it all was. Microsoft even put spatial into their free version.
I can’t recall the last time I used stand alone SQL Server, mostly my days are PostGIS or some cloud based spatial geodatabase engine. But, the line before SQL Server 2008 and after is clear as day. All of a sudden enterprise grade geodatabase when from niche to normal and spatial ceased to be special. Using Oracle Spatial or Esri ArcSDE always ended with me tossing the server in the trash.
I mean we’ve been saying it since Elon had bought Twitter, but the deed is done.
The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain
I was talking to a good friend over email last month and he had this to say:
The fun days of early twitter and before that blogging certainly made our industry more fun — thanks so much for your key role in that. Sadly those days seem to be gone and I don’t know where to find the modern equivalents.
He is so right, I’m not sure how important my role was in the whole Twitter Geospatial world was, but that grouping we had back then was some of the best sharing of ideas and opinions I’ve ever been part of. I find myself rarely sharing anything spatial on Twitter anymore, mostly it is where I go to complain about the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Lakers or Arizona State Sun Devils. And most of that is just shouting into the abyss. This leaves no space for any outlet of my thought and feelings on spatial and the such.
Hence I’m back to blogging, I feel like this has always been the best format for longer form thoughts and given I control the content vs some insane emerald mine heir this is better for my sanity. I am laughing at some of your still using RSS readers (heck I’m one) and having this post show up in your feed after many years. Thanks for never unsubscribing and stay tuned!
I’m not saying I’ll never post here again, but I think this blog has run its course. Follow me at http://jamesfee.org. Part of this is, what do I do about twitter after some nutty billionaire ruins it and partly about this conversation. Update your RSS: https://jamesfee.org/feed.xml Subscribe via weekly email: https://jamesfee.org/subscribe/ Follow on micro.blog: https://micro.blog/jamesfee
My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS. I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do […]
If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. […]
Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know. The last SOTM I went to was in 2013 which was a blast. But I have to be honest, not only did this slip my mind, none of my feeds highlighted it to me. Not only that, apparently Esri is having a conference soon. (wait for me […]
Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together. Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE, where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though […]
So my last post was very positive. I figured out how to relate the teams that share a stadium with the stadium itself. This was important because I wanted to eliminate the redundant points that were on top of each other. For those who don’t recall, I have an example in this gist: Now I […]
In a way it is good that Sean Gillies doesn’t follow me anymore. Because I can hear his voice in my head as I was trying to do something really stupid with the project. But Sheldon helps frame what I should be doing with what I was doing: Exactly! What the hell? Why was I […]
UPDATE – See the plan. Boy, where to start? First, for those who haven’t been following, this happened over the winter. Major League Baseball announced on Friday (February 12, 2021) a new plan for affiliated baseball, with 120 Minor League clubs officially agreeing to join the new Professional Development League (PDL). A full list of Major […]
Last Tuesday I started at HERE Technologies with the Professional Services group in the Americas. I’ve probably used HERE and their legacy companies data and services for most of my career so this is a really cool opportunity to work with a mobile data company. I’m really excited about working with some of their latest […]
I’ve had a ton of experience with Unity and Digital Twins but I have been paying attention to Unreal Engine. I think the open nature of Unity is probably more suited for the current Digital Twin market, but competition is so important for innovation. This project where Unreal Engine was used to create a digital […]
Smart Cities really start to become valuable when they integrate with Digital Twins. Smart Cities do really well with transportation networks and adjusting when things happen. Take, for example, construction on an important Interstate highway that connects the city core with the suburbs causes backups and a smart city can adjust traffic lights, rail, and other modes of transportation to help adjudicate the problems. This works really well because the transportation system talk to each other and decisions can be made to refocus commutes toward other modes of transportation or other routes. But unfortunately, Digital Twins don’t do a great job talking to Smart Cities.
Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash A few months ago I talked about Digital Twins and messaging. The idea that:
Digital twins require connectivity to work. A digital twin without messaging is just a hollow shell, it might as well be a PDF or a JPG. But connecting all the infrastructure of the real world up to a digital twin replicates the real world in a virtual environment. Networks collect data and store it in databases all over the place, sometimes these are SQL-based such as Postgres or Oracle, and other times they are simple as SQLite or flat-file text files. But data should be treated as messages back and forth between clients.
This was in the context of a Digital Twin talking to services that might not be hardware-based, but the idea stands up for how and why a Digital Twin should be messaging the Smart City at large. Whatever benefits a Digital Twin gains from an ecosystem that collects and analyzes data for decision-making those benefits become multiplied when those systems connect to other Digital Twins. But think outside a group of Digital Twins and the benefit of the Smart City when all these buildings are talking to each other and the city to make better decisions about energy use, transportation, and other shared infrastructure across the city or even the region (where multiple Smart Cities talk to each other).
When all these buildings talk to each other, they can help a city plan, grow and evolve into a clean city. What we don’t have is a common data environment (CDE) that cities can use. We have seen data sharing on a small scale in developments but not on a city-wide or regional scale. To do this we need to agree on model standards that allow not only Digital Twins to talk to each other (Something open like Bentley’s iTwin.js) and share ontologies. Then we need that Smart City CDE where data is shared, stored, and analyzed at a large scale.
One great outcome of this CDE is all this data can be combined with City ordinances to give tools like Delve from Sidewalk Labs even more data to create their generative design options. Buildings are not a bubble in a city and their impacts on the city extend out beyond the boundaries of the parcel they are built on. That’s what so exciting about this opportunity, manage assets in a Digital Twin on a micro-scale, but share generalized data about those decisions to the city at large which then can share them with other Digital Twins.
And lastly, individual Smart Cities aren’t bubbles either. They have huge impacts on the region or even the country that they are in. If we can figure out how to create a national CDE, one that covers a country as diverse as the United States, we can have something that can even benefit the world at large. Clean cities are the future and thinking about them on a small scale will only result in the gentrification of affluent areas and leave less well areas behind. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world like that and we have the processes in place to ensure that they have a better place than use to grow up in.
Now before we get too far, Apple has not created anything close to a Digital Twin as we know them. But what they have done is created an easy way to import your building models into Apple Maps. Apple calls this their Indoor Maps program.
Easily create detailed maps of your indoor spaces and let visitors see where they are right in your app. Organizations with large public and private spaces like airports, shopping centers, arenas, hospitals, universities, and private office buildings can register for the Indoor Maps Program. Indoor maps are built using industry standard tools and require only your existing Wi-Fi network to enable GPS-level location accuracy so visitors can navigate your spaces with ease.
Victoria Airport in the Apple IMDF Sandbox OK, so clearly this is all about navigation. How do I know where I am in a building and how do I get to a place I need to be. Of course, this is somewhat interesting on your iPhone or iPad in Apple Maps, but clearly, there is more to this than just how do I find the restroom on floor 10 of the bank tower.
To load your buildings in Apple you need to use Mapkit or Mapkit.js and convert your buildings into Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF). IMDF is actually a great choice because it is GeoJSON and working toward being an OGC standard (for whatever that is worth these days). I did find it interesting that Apple highlights the following as the use case for IMDF:
- Indoor wayfinding
- Indoor routing
- Temporal constraints
- Connectivity amongst mapped objects
- Location-based services
- Query and find by location functionality
If you’re familiar with GeoJSON, IMDF will look logical to you:
{
"id": "11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111",
"type": "Feature",
"feature_type": "building",
"geometry": null,
"properties": {
"category": "parking",
"restriction": "employeesonly",
"name": {
"en": "Parking Garage 1"
},
"alt_name": null,
"display_point": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [1.0, 2.0]
},
"address_id": "2222222-2222-2222-2222-222222222222"
}
}
I encourage you to review the IMDF docs to learn more but we’re talking JSON here so it’s exactly how you’d expect it to work.
Because IMDF buildings are generalized representations of the real-world data, this isn’t actually a Digital Twin. It also means that you need to do some things to your files before converting them to IMDF. Autodesk, Esri, and Safe Software all support IMDF so you should be able to use their tools to handle the conversions. I’ve done the conversion with Safe FME and it works very well and probably the best way to handle this. In fact, Safe has an IMDF validator which does come in handy for sure.
Safe FME support of IMDF What does make moving your buildings to Apple’s Indoor platform is the new iPhone 12 and iPad Pro LiDAR support. This brings out some really great AR capabilities that become enabled with Apple’s devices. As I said last week, the LiDAR support in the current devices is more about getting experience with LiDAR use cases than actual LiDAR use. This is all about eventual Apple Glass (and Google Glass too) support and the AR navigation that can be done when you have hyper-accurate indoor models in your mapping software.
I’ve been dusting off my MapKit skills because I think not only is this capability useful for many companies but it really isn’t that hard to enable. I am spending some time thinking about how to use the extension capability of IMDF to see how IoT and other services can be brought in. Given the generalized nature of IMDF, it could be a great way to allow visualizing IoT and other services without the features of a building getting in the way. Stay tuned!