It’s the end of summer so I give you a light hearted experiment in the application of Generative AI. My quest to recreate the cinematic masterpiece The Battle of Britain, but with a twist, has hit a slight snag. The twist, you ask? Cats. Yes, I wanted to harness the power of GenAI to create …
Read more “The Cat-astrophic Battle of Britain: My GenAI Film Fiasco”
The geospatial industry has long been on a quest for a universally accepted system to identify real-world entities like buildings, roads, and businesses. Such a system promises seamless interoperability, but its pursuit has been fraught with challenges, often clashing with the commercial realities and vested interests of powerful data owners. Let’s explore this journey through …
Read more “The Quest for a Universal Geospatial ID: From the One Ring to the Holy Grail?”
This famous phrase by Chairman Mao can be subverted to focus on the final step of a journey, which is particularly relevant to solving one of the hardest problems in geospatial technology: the final 10-metre problem. How can we provide high-accuracy pedestrian navigation or wayfinding to ensure users reach their actual final destination, such as …
Read more “A journey of a thousand miles ends with a single step. “
For years, the geospatial industry has grappled with an identity crisis, often resorting to a rather peculiar linguistic habit: slapping “Geo-” in front of any technology term remotely related to location. “Geo-analytics,” “geo-fencing,” “geo-marketing”—the list goes on. And don’t get be started on Geo-AI ! This pervasive prefixing, I’d argue, is a desperate attempt to …
When Snap Map first launched within the Snapchat app, it was met with a mix of curiosity and privacy concerns. Yet, this integrated feature has quietly become a significant success story, particularly among its core demographic – Millennials. While perhaps not always the focus of mainstream tech commentary, Snap Map has proven to be far …
Read more “Snap Map the maps app you probably don’t use.. and that’s the point !”
For people of my generation the term Splat will always be associated with the Saturday Morning Children’s TV show ‘Tiswas” and was to the result of someone getting a “custard pie” in their face… Now the hot topic in 3D Geospatial rendering are Gaussian Splats.. In Geospatial 3D, Gaussian splats are used as for rendering …
It was a great pleasure to spend half a hour talking with my friend Jerry Brotton on his excellent History of Maps podcast, “What’s Your Map“. This excellent podcast series cover the history of cartography by getting people to select a single map to place it’s significance in the development of mapping. The podcast is …
There is a joke/useful analogy that in very simple terms explains despite all the complexities and technicalities, how modern AI systems work at a fundamental level.. An AI walks into a pub and goes up to the bar, the bartender greets the newcomer and wants to know what they would like to drink.. “What’s everyone …
It was 20 years ago today… BA002 on finals returning from New York JFK on the last commercial operation by Concorde on the 24th October 2003 marking the end of the era of supersonic air travel. Filled with celebrities G-BOAF touched down at 4:05pm and I was lucky enough to be there amongst the many …
Read more “Why Concorde is the only airliner at Heathrow on Google Maps…”
The mechanical turk is a recurring warning to technologists and perhaps wider society in the need to have a healthy degree of scepticism when it comes to demos of what appears to be game changing advances in technology. The original Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player, was a fraudulent chess-playing machine demonstrated in the late …
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