Tech Update

It's been a busy week here. Yesterday we packed up early in the morning and took a ferry from Valletta, Malta to Pachino, Sicily. From there we hopped a few buses and took a beautiful ride through the country, passing by the world's most active volcano (Mount Etna) along the way. We reached our hotel in Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) in the afternoon and got situated for deployment. Billy will talk about that, so I will cover the other things that have been going on. Despite the nagging fatigue that we are all feeling, there have been some really great project improvements. Since these will also be addressed in similar blog posts, I will give a little update on mine: the archaeologist graphical interface.

I have already put together a majority of the framework for the interface, and recently began loading in cistern meshes. Due to the fact that Billy and Jeff have their code complete (aside from per-cistern fine tuning), the three of us can pump out a cistern model and have it online in about an hour. We will be doing this for each new cistern that we deploy the robot into. My project is still running into some choppiness which will be sorted out in 2-3 days.

Here is a sample of my progress as of today.

Note: If you are running Linux, you may run into difficulty with the Unity3D plugin.

I am still working on the textures/lighting of the cistern and water, the spherical linear interpolation of the rotational trackball (should be a quick fix!), and the photo selection on the right hand side of the interface. It may not be very easy to see, but right now all that the photo selection does is highlight a region on the wall that the selected picture shows. Once the photo selection is complete the model will rotate so that the highlighted area that the picture displays will be more visible and a frustrum with the robot's position and angle of view will be shown. I also intend to use Tim's higher quality go-pro pictures, rather than these stills from the video stream from last year. I might end up adding a big pop-up version of the photo as well. We'll see what happens. Aside from that, it's time to start rapidly uploading and spitting out cisterns as we deploy into them!

Archaeologist Graphic Interface Update

After a meeting this week, we've decided on the applications that will be used for the 3D graphic interface project. Because Google Earth already has a geo-spacially oriented, properly scaled, navigable world built out of satellite images, we decided that it would be best to create a Google Earth layer with links to SONAR mosaics and 3D meshes for each site. This allows us to build the framework for our interface before the trip, and then fill the information from each site right after it is visited.

We plan to embed our Google Earth layer right into Sara's water and society website, and host all of our other files (3D cistern meshes, SONAR overlays, etc.) there as well. The embedded Google Earth layer will have pop up descriptions, pictures, and links to other information collected from each cistern. I will still be using an embedded Unity3D frame to display the 3D cistern meshes (slightly simpler than writing code in WebGL that would allow the 3D mesh file to be navigable by a camera, although it does require a browser plug-in unlike WebGL). This frame will also be hosted on the Omeka water and society website. I should have a samples up shortly! Stay tuned!