Xenon writes "Recently, 3D Nature created a three-minute 3D visualization of the destructive power of the California wildfires. Working on a tight budget and deadline under contract with the Institute for Business & Home Safety, 3D Nature recreated the affected areas in Visual Nature Studio, modeling terrain, roads, vegetation and houses. An informative voice-over explained the factors underlying the survival or destruction of various homes as the viewer witnessed firsthand the effects of the fire. "Wildfires are called wild for a reason, they can be uncontrollable," said IBHS President & CEO Julie Rochman. "Through the video we were able to help people understand that they can take back control by protecting their homes from these fires. We were able to illustrate that it doesn't have to cost a lot to make some very effective changes.""

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The University of Nottingham and Open Source Geospatial Foundation are happy to announce the First Open Source GIS UK Conference on 22nd June (Monday), 2009. The event is organised by the Centre for Geospatial Science. Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director of Open Source Geospatial Foundation will deliver the keynote presentation. The conference website will be activated on January 15, 2009. See this Press release for more info: http://www.geoconnexion.com/geo_news_article/First-Open-Source-GIS-UK-Conference---22-June-2009/4509

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The Spatial Sustain blog has some information on this. Here is part of their summary : "There’s certainly a large community of users of ESRI’s GIS software that apply these tools to environmental applications, yet there hasn’t been a focused effort within the company on environmental solutions. That has now changed with the hiring of Dr. Robin D. Smith as environmental industry manager with a background in air and waste management and toxicology. With Smith’s mandate on the stewardship of our environment, we will see further software and services from ESRI that place an emphasis on solving sustainability challenges."

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The Earth Is Square has some information on this. From reading it, it appears it's more like a request for some help. Here is part of their summary : "Tim G from the WorldWind Fourms has been making some nice headway in his sparetime with getting KML support working within WWJava. He has the code available for anyone to try and to make improvements on. From the Readme file: Right now there is support for: ploygons (including extruded polygons with holes), lines (including tesselated lines, no extrusion) and points (but only displayed as pushpins). There is no support for overlays, complex(dae) 3d models, regions, animation, etc. It only knows how to read a few things from the KML file. So if you load a file with it and see nothing, that feature is probably just not supported."

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From the Ogle Earth blog : "This past week, georeferenced panorama photo site 360Cities rolled out a site-wide upgrade and redesign. The experience — both for viewers and panorama publishers — is now much improved. The single biggest change, in my mind, is that panoramas are now served in a multiresolution format using the much-lauded KRPano engine. Just as with Google Earth satellite imagery, as you zoom in on a panorama, the resolution of the image automatically increases. This is a big deal — it makes the experience much faster without sacrificing detail."

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