THE JAMES RESERVE is a place where the natural meets the digital.
Part of the San Jacinto mountain range in Southern California, the James is a nature reserve that covers nearly 30 acres. It’s closed to the public. It’s off the grid. Vehicles aren’t allowed. But Sean Askay calls it “one of the most heavily instrumented places in the US.” Robots on high-tension cables drop climate sensors into this high-altitude forest. Bird’s nests include automated cameras and their own sensors. Overseen by the University of California, Riverside, the reserve doubles as a research field station for biologists, academics, and commercial scientists.
In 2005, as a master’s student at the university, Askay took the experiment further still, using Google Earth to create avisual interface for all those cameras and sensors. “Basically, I built a virtual representation of the entire reserve,” he says. “You could ‘fly in’ and look at live video feeds or temperature graphs from inside a bird box.”
Somewhere along the way, the project caught the eye of Google’s Vint Cerf, a founding father of the Internet, and in 2007, Askay moved to Mountain View, California, home to Google headquarters. There, he joined the team that ran Google Earth, a sweeping software service that blends satellite photos and other images to create a digital window onto our planet (and other celestial bodies). Since joining the company, the 36-year-old has used the tool to build maps of war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. He put the service on the International Space Station, so astronautscould better understand where they were. Working alongside Buzz Aldrin, he built a digital tour of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Now, as Google Earth celebrates its 10th anniversary, Askay is taking over the entire project—as lead engineer—following the departure of founder Brian McClendon. He takes over at a time when the service is poised to evolve into a far more powerful research tool, an enormous echo of his work at the James Reserve. When it debuted in 2005, Google Earth was a wonderfully intriguing novelty. From your personal computer, you could zoom in on the roof of your house or get a bird’s eye view of the park where you made out with your first girlfriend. But it proved to be more than just a party trick. And with the rapid rise of two other digital technologies—neural networks and virtual reality—the possibilities will only expand.
Through an extension to Google’s Chrome web browser called Earth View, you can view “the most beautiful and striking” satellite images from around the world, “diving in” to places like Cuba. GOOGLE
A Visit to Prague
Neural networks—vast networks of machines that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain—can scour Google Earthin search of deforestation. They can track agricultural crops across the globe in an effort to identify future food shortages. They can examine the world’s oil tankers in an effort to predict gas prices. And it so happens that Google runs one of the most advanced neural networking operations in the world. For Google Earth, Askay says, “machine learning is the next frontier.”
According to Askay’s boss, Rebecca Moore, the company is already using neural networks to examine Google’s vast trove of satellite imagery. “We have the Google Brain,” she says, referring to the central neural networking operation Google has built inside the company, “and we’re doing some experiments.” That’s news. But it’s not that surprising. Two startups—Orbital Insight and Descartes Labs—are alreadydoing much the same thing.
Meanwhile, virtual reality—as exhibited by headsets like Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard—is bringing a new level of fidelity and, indeed, realism to the kind of immersive digital experience offered by Google E arth. Today, using satellite imagery and street-level photos, Askay and Google are already building 3-D models of real-life places like Prague that you can visit from your desktop PC (see video at top). But in the near future, this experience will move into Oculus-like headsets, which can make you feel like you’re really there.
“We have so much interesting stuff,” Askay says of Google Earth’s massive collection of images. “How amazing would it be to experience Google Earth in that environment?”
The Google Outreach
Google isn’t the only one that will drive the evolution of Google Earth. In 2007, not long after taking the job at Google, Askay flew to Brazil, helping an indigenous tribe, the Surui, map deforestation in their area of the Amazon, and this gave rise to a wider project called Google Earth Engine. With Earth Engine, outside developers and companies can use Google’s enormous network of data centers to run sweeping calculations on the company’s satellite imagery and other environmental data, a digital catalog that dates back more than 40 years.
“So, if you want to look at 40 years of Landsat imagery and do change projection over time, you can,” Askay says. “You could do retrospective models of where deforestation took place and how fast, as well as predictive models and even near real-time detection. We’re getting to the point where we can start sending alerts saying that something that looks like deforestation has occurred in the last three days.”
As it stands, Earth Engine is only available to a limited number of outsiders, but Askay and Moore say Google plans to gradually open it up to a much larger audience. With a project called Map of Life, independent researchers are already examining how global warming in changing the habitat ranges of particular animal species. Others are working to track water resources. The World Resources Institute now uses the service to provide a map of deforestation not only in the Amazon, but across the globe.
Read more at WIRED
0 comments:
Post a Comment