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Laura bought some Randy Hare boxes and we pulled BB out to see what he’s think of this method of training. BB is already a trained and certified cadaver dog. It was neat to see that Laura could introduce a distraction into the game almost immediately. We didn’t have any tennis balls on a string handy, so we used a rubber ball on a whip. The whip part was torn off fairly quickly. But that made the ball on a string rather perfect for this purpose.
If you click on the photo you will be taken to a Virtual Earth map with very high resolution “birdseye” view images and an embedded GPS track from a track I ran with Zooey over a year ago. The ability to load arbitrary gpx tracks to virtual maps is something I whipped up over the weekend.
One thing I noticed switching back and forth between hybrid aerial map view and birdseye view is that there is some distortion of the track in birdseye view. That is, along some segments, the track is displaced by up to 10 meters or so. You can test this for yourself. I presume this is caused by the technique used to create the effect. Most likely, what we are seeing is the track moving from a planar surface to one that crosses planes. Microsoft should be able to correct for how they handle polylines when users switch from one map view to another… if they so desired. The aerial view is lots more accurate, though you can’t see nearly the same detail as in the birdseye view.
I’d still like to do some fancy things like include speed information as in the image below. If you notice, you can see the latter part of the track has two lines. This is because the tracklayer did not turn the GPS on until most of the track had been set. The ability to compare what the dog did with what the tracklayer did is very useful.
Although there are all sorts of great mapping applications online such as Google Maps/Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, and ESRI Arcweb Explorer, it takes a bit of searching around to find a service with updated and high resolution images for any particular area. Fortunately, most of them have nice programming interfaces that let us easily create custom maps and applications. It would be easy to create an application mashup that would let you switch from map service to map service to find the best imagery… but no one seems to have done this such that it’s also easy to upload your GPS tracks and do interesting things with them.
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