Lasse van den Bosch Christensensen
Thesis Attachment
Email Correspondence 02
Matthias Basler



Subject:
Re: Future of the Geo-Modelers
From:
"Matthias Basler" <XXXXXX@XXXXXX.org>
Date:
02/27/2014 09:11 PM
To:
"Lasse van den Bosch Christensen" <lasselvdbc@gmail.com>

Hi Lasse,
 
it took me some time to completely re-write the story in English, but it is attached to this mail now.
I am pretty sure you would ask for screenshots next. ;-) Yep, they are attached as well. The screenshot of Weißenburg is the city model at its maximum coverage
 
Matthias Basler
XXXXXX@XXXXXX.org
 
 
Gesendet: Montag, 24. Februar 2014 um 11:05 Uhr
Von: "Lasse van den Bosch Christensen" <lasselvdbc@gmail.com>
An: "Matthias Basler" <XXXXXX@XXXXXX.org>
Betreff: Re: Re: Future of the Geo-Modelers
Good morning Matthias,
 
Thanks for sharing your concerns. 
 
At this point there are no goals defined for the project, but I think most would agree upon an open system which does not rely on one provider. These goals should be engaged, but there is a need for a space where such a discussion can start. I could help finding and facilitating such space, but I think it's essential that the modelers-community in collaboration with developers define what this new earth should look like and how it should work. I understand that you cannot commit your self fully, but I think it's important that you share your voice. You could help defining these goals, even without going 'technical'.
 
 
The interview will be part of my written thesis. This goes along with other conversations with modelers and various discussions from the official forums. The thesis will be publicly available once written, but it most probably wont attract a great deal of attention. 
 
Additionally the 'project' will be my final work in my masters course, and going to be exhibited in a gallery space here in Rotterdam. ( http://www.tentrotterdam.nl/)
 
I want to portray the community of GE and display the work it has done. It's about the passion, energy, time and effort, that each modeler put into his/her projects. Added up with the work of thousands of other modelers, this started to give shape and dimension to the earth. This earth is provided by a company. It's a closed platform upon which the modelers inhabit but does not master.

In this space, a current idea of mine is to display a set of video interviews with Google Earth-'super modelers' sharing their stories. Whether you want to participate in this, is entirely up to you. Anyway, at this point, i'm far from being ready to proceed with this plan. 
Right now we could start at a written basis. This interview would most probably be available for reading within the exhibition.
 
 
I hope this is more clear to you.
 
Have a nice day and all the best,
 
Lasse
 
 
 
2014-02-23 22:07 GMT+01:00 Matthias Basler <XXXXXX@XXXXXX.org>:
Hi Lasse.
 
> Did you ever receive any response trough the forum, on your suggestion to construct a new platform for the geo-modelers, and did you ever have any direct contact with other modelers?
 
No.
 
> If I make the attempt to gather the group of developers and supporters that you mention, would you join the project?
 
I cannot and will not give you a definitive answer on this.
Among others, it depends how this project will look like, for example the project's specific goals and if I will be technically able to help or if it is over my head. And also I have to clearly make the point that there are times of the year when I am occupied by different hobbys (mainly related to photography), which makes it difficult to reliably work on other projects.
 
> Since I'm trying to cover different modelers experiences with Google Earth and the related platforms, I would also like to hear your story. That is of course, if you would like (and take your time) to share. Would you be up for this? I have some different topics I'm interested in addressing, but the structure of this 'sharing' is entirely up to you.
 
Is this sort of an interview as part of your master thesis? You see, before I start answering questions of this sort I'd like to know precisely what you intend to do with the answers, i.e. publish them in some way or another. If I see no objections in this usage I'm going to give your "my story".
 
Matthias Basler
XXXXXX@XXXXXX.org
 
 

Hi again Matthias,

Thank you so much for responding on my mail.

I follow your concern regarding starting an open source software project on your own. I think it's important to rely on a platform which has a less 'insecure' and dependent nature than the Google Earth project.

Did you ever receive any response trough the forum, on your suggestion to construct a new platform for the geo-modelers, and did you ever have any direct contact with other modelers?

 

If I make the attempt to gather the group of developers and supporters that you mention, would you join the project?

Since I'm trying to cover different modelers experiences with Google Earth and the related platforms, I would also like to hear your story. That is of course, if you would like (and take your time) to share. Would you be up for this? I have some different topics I'm interested in addressing, but the structure of this 'sharing' is entirely up to you.

Hope you aren't overwhelmed by the questions.

Best of,

 

Lasse

 

Ellingen3D 2012 - St. Georg und das Schloß.jpg


Weißenburg3D 2012-11 Obertorstraße.jpg


Geomodelling Story.txt

Matthias Basler: Geomodelling for Google Earth

In the year 2007 I read in the magazine c't (a German magazine about computer and technology) about the possibility to create 3D models of buildings using SketchUp. This article caught my interest for several reasons: First, the software was free of charge. Second, it seemed that I should possess the skills needed to do this, being a hobby photographer and being familiar with image processing and CAD systems. Third, I lived in a town with a medieval looking city centre worth being shown to the world. And forth, I had been using Google Earth for some time by then and the prospect that the cities in Google Earth would soon extend to the third dimension made me excited.

I soon started to create the first building, my own house, and with the basic skills acquired during this model I soon created the first dozen of buildings in the city of Weißenbung in Bayern (Germany), the neighbouring town Ellingen and, for example, in Naumburg, where I built a large model of the famous Naumburg Cathedral.

The process of getting a model into Google Earth started in SketchUp 5 at that time. After importing the terrain for the area of interest, one would model the basic shapes on the position given by the orthophoto and the terrain and would refine them afterwards. Own photos of all accessible sides of the building would then be processed, freed from distortions and resized, and the thus created textures would then be applied to the outer faces of the hollow model. Finally the model would be uploaded into the 3D warehouse with a description. There it was (usually) available publicly. If the model was marked "Google Earth ready" - which meant it was georeferenced and fulfilled the "acceptance criteria" - Google would review the building and, if there were no objections, would accept it for Google Earth. After the next "3D layer update" the model would then appear in Google Earth for every user to see and enjoy.

In 2007, when I started with SketchUp 5, the application still had a few nasty glitches. For example it could happen that the textures got mixed up in Google Earth if textures with lower-case and upper-case file extensions were used in the same models. Also special characters in texture file names, such as the German umlauts, could make the application fail. There were issues with semi-transparent textures, positioning and so on. I literally spend days finding the root causes of some mysterious phenomenons and finding workarounds. Most issues were fixed in one of the following SketchUp releases and sometimes new bugs were accidentally introduced. Nothing exceptional in software development, as we know.

Soon, in 2008 I realized I could help fellow modellers to avoid the same issues, the same pitfalls by writing a guide. This document, the "Tips for modelling buildings for Google Earth" helped the modellers from finding the least buggy version of SketchUp and Google Earth over questions of efficient modelling and finding the optimal size for texture images up to the process of uploading and getting the model accepted. I told them how to care for their model and what to correct should the model be rejected. Some fellow modellers helped and added their tips as well. As my skills and knowledge improved over the years, so did the tutorial. It was soon embedded in a fellow geomodeller's website and even acknowledged and pointed to by the Google Guides. 

The community was an important part of the overall project, obviously. How else could the aim to model "the whole world" be achieved? I never had a problem with "crowd-sourcing" and I felt it was fair enough: We got a software for free, Google got the models for usage (and bug reports by the way) and each geomodeller could enjoy or envy the fellow modeller's nice buildings. It really gave me a pleasure to soar over cities like Nördlingen (Germany), Getaria (Spain), Antwerp (Belgium), San Francisco or Vancouver.

There were Google Guides present in the forums, the backbone of this community. They answered those questions no other modeller would answer, did announcements and corrected wrong prejudices and assumptions which sometimes occurred. I was surprised that within the community there were no prejudices concerning the countries of the fellow modellers. As long as modellers were polite and could make themselves understood it didn't matter if they were from the USA, from the Netherlands, from Brazil, Russia, China or Iraq. I was also astonished how liberal the Google Guides were concerning the discussions. Critical comments about bugs, about the review process and about unfavourable announcements were accepted, and only really rude comments were deleted for good. (SPAM was and continued to be a problem sometimes over the holidays or on weekends.)

Of course it was Google which steered the whole process. From time to time "Google did listen" and provided a feature the community asked for. Several other requested features or bug fixes, however, were never realized respectively fixed. As the years passed by new features and plugins were added to SketchUp, such as the "sandbox tools", but the overall modelling process remained the same. Starting with SketchUp 8 I got the feeling that Google no longer planned features specifically for geomodellers - the target audience for SketchUp was changing.

In 2009 Google "Building Maker" was introduced, a web application, which allowed the user to create simple geometrical models from oblique imagery, that is, from aerial photos which were exactly georeferenced to their location on the earth. Users would create the shapes, the application would automatically pick the best images to texture it. In later versions own photos could also be used to texture the building. Building maker models were usually as low in quality as the provided images were, but as a quick-to-create gap filler between the highly detailed landmark buildings they were a nice addition and made sense.

I myself created a few buildings in North Vancouver, Canada, using this tool, since I had no own photos of them. I managed to approximate fairly complex buildings and architectures with the simple available geometries. Still, the SketchUp models were way more detailed and better-looking from close up.

After two years I knew the tricks how to create SketchUp models which were simple and small (in terms of file size) without scarifying too much detail. Such efficient models were preferred by Google, which is why I generally had few problems getting the models accepted in that time. Also, I modelled in an area where there wasn't any competition from fellow modellers either, thus no problems with having to compete for the "better" model in Google Earth.

Over the years the whole process was streamlined: In 2007 reviews could take several months, in 2012 they were down to usually one update cycle (<2 weeks). There also existed a schedule for the updates in Google Earth, that is, when the accepted models would "go live". Google held training camps all over the world and the community was flourishing, as far as I could tell.

While until 2008 I had created only landmark buildings, starting from 2009 I created what I called models of "whole quarters" of Weißenburg. These were larger blocks of buildings having a slightly simpler geometry in order to cut down the time. (I spent three hours to three days on a model, depending on its complexity and size, with the average house requiring 5 hours of work or so.) In 2009 I had no problems to get the first quarters accepted and quickly advanced towards my goal to created a complete city model for the city center of Weißenburg within its extended city wall from 1376.

At the same time I finished landmark buildings in other parts of Germany, e.g. Wittenberg, Fürstenfeld and quite a few churches in the villages around Weißenburg. I also modelled a handful of stave churches in Norway, Germany and Poland, which were really nice buildings to model and look at.

In April 2010 I was contacted by a local newspaper for an interview about the city model project. A few weeks later I could read a full-page article in the local addition of a saturday's newspaper issue. I was proud, of course. My hope that this article would encourage other people in Weißenburg to support my project, did unfortunately not come true. I only received a few calls from companies which wanted to use my models for their advertising, that is, for making money out of them. I politely declined. (I was aware I could not forbid them the use since Googles terms of service made the models publicly usable for almost any goal once they were uploaded to the 3D warehouse.)

I did, however, not decline when the city of Weißenburg asked me to use the models for a new city map to be applied next to the train station in Weißenburg. It is supposed to guide visitors to the tourist attractions of the city: The gothic city hall, the St. Andreas Church, the city wall and the market hall "Schranne" for example. I am still proud walking past this map each time I am at the train station. And I am happy that it so far did not fell prey to vandalism either.

In 2011 I did a pause in the modelling process to pursue some other hobbies of mine. When I started again in 2012 I had already reached a coverage of 30-40% of Weißenburg's city center. Things had changed in the previous years: The acceptance criteria were stricter than ever, but also the possibilities concerning a more realistic terrain and the pool of images I had available had increased.

In order to ease modelling the buildings with correct shapes I even purchased exact maps from the Bavarian surveying office ("Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung"), so I got the ground plans right.

One reason why I decided the whole city needed an overhaul was that in 2010 a new aerial imagery became applied to Weißenburg, Ellingen and other places. As it was almost bound to happen, now my buildings were standing 1-2 meters off the place where they were supposed to be standing according to the new orthophoto. I believe almost every modellers has cursed about Google's inability to either provide "stable georeferencing" for subsequent imagery or automatically move the buildings to their new positions. In a dedicated discussion the Google guides confessed even skilled geographers and mathematicians did not have a working idea for preventing this unfortunate situation. In the end it meant that the modeller had to manually move dozens, hundreds and sometime a thousand models, upload them again and often enough, not get them accepted again in the first place because of the meanwhile tightened acceptance criteria or for other reasons.

I believe this never resolved issue was one reason why Google finally gave up working with user models.

As I said, in 2012 I started at the same time to re-position, re-organize and improve the existing models in order to still comply with the acceptance criteria. For example I had to split my quarter models into individual buildings, which drastically increased the management overhead for me, having to upload 3-8 models instead of one. During photo flights in spring 2009 and 2010 I had shot photos of almost the whole city centre from the air from different angles, and these photos now helped with the need to also texture building faces not visible from the public streets and for Google's new requirement that roofs must be photo-textured as well and repeating textures (even if created from photos) were not acceptable any more.

In the summer of 2012 I re-worked most of the eastern part of the existing city centre models and, by the way, filled gaps of missing buildings as I came across them. I also reworked parts of the city wall and the area closest to the railway station. Due to the better roofs, the improved backsides of the buildings and the increased coverage Weißenburg really became a joy to look at for me. (That is, except for the fact that the new imagery from 2010, albeit shaper, had a much more unrealistic grey appearance which made the ground look like a volcano had shed its ash on it.)

In October 2012 I stopped working again for two reasons. The first being that planning of a larger journey and some Christmas gifts to be created required my attention. The other one was that I felt it increasingly difficult and frustrating trying to get actually improved (repositioned, more detailed) models re-accepted for Google Earth. They were clearly better than the old ones, and yet the reviewers would find some aspect which didn't please them. Be it the roof texture not looking realistic enough, be it that two buildings were in one model (because they were somehow related such as several buildings of a brewery) or the like. I literally wasted days correcting things which, from today's perspective, were completely irrelevant.
And I knew that there would be models ahead in the eastern city centre, which I would not be able to improve up to Google's current standards. I therefore did what most modellers did from the very start: I left these models "as is", accepted that they were slightly misplaced and hoped Google would not throw them out soon.

It was then, in October 2012, that I had over 400 models in the 3D warehouse and ~370 of them accepted. This meant that, since some of them were quarters, I had probably almost 500 buildings present in Weißenburg alone. Around 40% of the city centre were covered and several models outside it. I had landmark models in several Bavarian cities and villages, such as Augsburg, Fürstenfeld, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Ellingen and Treuchtlingen but also in Wernigerode, Naumburg, Jena, Wittenberg, Neuschönau (Bavarian Forest) as well as the mentioned stave churches and the models in Vancouver. Among them were a few gems, such as the city hall of Wernigerode, Fürstenfeld abbey, the Naumburg Cathedral or the egg-shaped view tower of the canopy walkway near Neuschönau.

Until 2012 there had been camps and "Model your town" competitions, and although I was never the winner of such competition I got appreciation from fellow modellers and Google, which showcased my models of Weißenburg in 2012. I am proud that I earned such a lot of appreciation by other modellers - most of my models were rated 5 star, even some which I myself did not perceive as optimal. It really did matter more to me seeing that people liked my buildings than to see I had earned "another badge" for getting the umpteenth model accepted. This badges business is something for people who feel good with a lot of automatically generated honours and rewards. I knew in the end they were worthless, I could not buy one single bread from them.

Beautiful models of other skilled models inhabited the virtual earth by now, and I often spent hours just browsing through their collections, giving feedback here and there or flying over  especially beautiful cities and landscapes. There were admirable castles and palaces, stunningly detailed bridges and atmospheric models of cottages or windmills. I surely felt I was part of a huge piece of art being created.

In 2013 I continued to watch the geomodelling business more passively. Google announced in mid 2012 that they would work with 3D imagery (complete 3D city models fully computed from imagery taken by air-planes with high-resolution cameras), just as Nokia Maps and Apple before them. This made me wonder about the future of this all. Actually I was not only disappointed about the low quality, which was in my opinion a horror to look at in some areas. I also felt that Google had double standards now: Why the strict standards for our user models (such as "one building per model"), while at the same time they created city models where the whole city was one model, with no information on the single buildings at all?

My concerns grew stronger with the announcement in March 2013 that Building Maker was to be retired. With the new 3D imagery being used this move made some sense, since poor models were replaced by automatically created poor models.

I reckoned that in a few years time the used-made models would become useless, and it became clear to me that modelling with SketchUp in larger cities was likely a waste of time by now. Still, I felt safe in areas like Weißenburg, because I didn't think (and still don't believe) there will be 3D imagery available for rural areas any time soon.

And yet, Google surprised and bitterly disappointed me with their announcement of August 6th 2013 that by the start of October 13 (hardly 2 months to go) the review pipeline would be retired - everywhere! What this meant is, that after October no more user-made models, new or edited, would appear in Google Earth. The reasons given were of course cutting the costs, especially for the review process, and achieving a higher consistency in quality and colour between the models of a city.

For me this obviously meant that I would not be able to finish Weißenburg's city centre. But it meant more: After October I would not even be able to update existing models in case new shops moved in or in case they got renovated or re-painted. Weißenburg's city model would become outdated soon, without any chance to take out the models.

This was a no-go for me. Not being able to manage my own models was in-acceptable. As I announced in the mailing list shortly after, I would remove all my 414 models from the 3D warehouse and therefore from Google Earth. Since the many, many raised voices of the modellers did not change Google's attitude concerning the shut-down I indeed realized my plan at the end of September. It is surprising that I didn't have any bad feelings about what I lost, probably because I still think that I was caught between a rock and a hard place and it was the right thing to do. Google made it clear they didn't need the community any more, so they didn't deserve my models any more - models created for free in over a thousand hours of time.

The famous Friedrich Schiller once placed the following words in the mouth of a black servant:
    "Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kann gehen."
    (engl. "The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go.")
He was sooo right.

I can be lucky that from the very beginning I correctly judged the risks associated with building a modelling business for this Google Earth review pipeline. Of course, over the few years some companies have successfully created paid company models, hotels and whole cities by order of their respective owner or city council. And yet, more then once I warned that Google did not give a guarantee for anything offered for free. In the light of this fact I was surprised that after the shut-down announcement 2013 several companies were furious about this decision because they suddenly lost their business model. They should have known! Of course, tell this to those poor fellows who didn't have another job and were happy to earn at least some money creating paid models.

The tragic aspects of all this are: First, there will likely not be any 3D imagery coverage for large parts of the world, not even for rural areas in the US, not to mention China or African countries. People there have drawn hope from Google trainings that they can improve their computer skills and show the world how nice their place is. This hope for them has now taken by the very company which spread it. Second, many high quality buildings are being replaced by lower quality buildings without any description. It is a significant loss of usefulness for me as a user.
The third aspect is that a huge piece of craftsmanship and art - which is what I consider the sum of all the good and excellent buildings created so far - is now slowly demolished and it will be hard, if not impossible, to bring it back one day. It is like burning books because there are now E-Book readers available.

Personally I have settled with this topic. Google is history for me, I have quit my account. Should there be another chance to populate another worldwide platform with user models - one whose future is not dependent on one company and its commercial plans, then I will have my models ready again.

Matthias Basler, Germany.

Weißenburg3D_NO - 2012-10.jpg


Weißenburg3D 2012-11 Wülzburg 3.jpg


Wernigerode3D - 201010_2.jpg


Attachments:
Ellingen3D 2012 - St. Georg und das Schloß.jpg287 KB
Weißenburg3D 2012-11 Obertorstraße.jpg109 KB
Geomodelling Story.txt19.8 KB
Weißenburg3D_NO - 2012-10.jpg243 KB
Weißenburg3D 2012-11 Wülzburg 3.jpg387 KB
Wernigerode3D - 201010_2.jpg137 KB