GeoDeo

One of my colleagues, Paul den Dulk, has created an impressive open source library for tiling called BruTile. BruTile allows among others for effects similar to DeepZoom and SeaDragon. On his blog he explains very well how to use the library.

While the BruTile project itself is impressive by itself, it is even more impressive to see the application Paul developed based on BruTile for the Microsoft Surface in a relatively short time. Different information sources are combined with a gesture driven application to demonstrate the awesome power of BruTile on the Surface. The video shows just some of the capabilities of this remarkable and valuable open source project.

Last month (finally) a couple of Microsoft Surfaces arrived at our offices.  In order to investigate the possibilities we have adapted a number of applications. One of them is NASA WorldWind which now runs on the Microsoft Surface and can be controlled by gestures and object recognition.

You can use a compass to make the globe turn around. Zooming and panning is implemented like in most multi-touch applications: moving a single finger pans the map. Moving two fingers towards each other or away from each other let you zoom in and out. Also the globe can be tilted easily by using three fingers where the third finger controls the angle of the tilt.

The compass is a nice demonstration of the additional possibilities of the Surface as you can see on the movie below.