This is so much fun. Where to start? Okay. So in September last year a few of us went to the O’Reilly FOO Camp. It’s an invitation-only event in Sebastopol in California where everyone’s expected to present what they’re thinking about or working on and where lots of fascinating conversations happen. It’s an honour to be invited and my favourite event of the year. I wrote about last year’s experience extensively with this post in particularMaps, Invaders, Robots & Throwiesbeing the most directly relevant to what I’m about to show you.
Anyway, one of the fun things that happened over the weekend was that Chris DiBona announced that Google were going to be doing a flyover of the campus and that we should take the opportunity to make some interesting art projects that would subsequently be visible from Google Maps and Google Earth. So we did.
The rumour is you’ll be able to see this in context on the sites and services concerned sometime in the middle of February, but Chris has been gracious enough to send me a Creative Commons-licensed snapshot of the entire campus showing both the project that Cal, Simon, Paul, Heathcote, Suw Charman, Biddulph and I put together (with help from lovely people like Jane), and the competing project that Chris and Jane masterminded themselves. So here they are. First off the Space Invaders that Cal, Biddulph, Simon, Paul, Heathcote, Suw, Jane and I put together:
And next up the Cylon raider created by Jane, Chris and their team:
You can see the whole photo here for the moment (be warned, it’s a couple of meg in size) and here below are some pictures of the building process as it happened. All photos are from Julian Bleecker’s FOO Camp set.
23 replies on “On Space Art in Sebastopol…”
brilliant! I’ve been checking google maps waiting for these for ages!
The space invaders work really well 🙂
The big picture is awesome! I hope this will become an annual tradition of the FOO Camp and we can look forward to even bigger and better creations.
How nice to see people having fun with google maps. You don’t always have to use it for serious stuff. That picture with space invaders somehow reminds of a game I played that was based on google maps. Ah here it is: a flight simulator with satellite images as background.
http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html
What is often assumed to be “satellite” photography is often shot by airplanes. That is the case with the image above. The resolution is much higher then anything commercially available from a satellite. For comparison, aerial photography can reach resolutions of less then three inches per pixel. That is, each pixel of the images represents less then three inches on the ground. Commercial satellite photography can produce resolutions of about 1 meter per pixel, which would leave the space invaders looking more like specks of dust.
Are we sending a violent signial to extra terrestrials that we are a violent race and will shoot down any alien invasion?
Looks like a giant warning sign to the sky.
Anyways..good job!
all the people laying about gives it a real Jonestown, grape koolaide look….
I created an image overlay of the Foo Camp aerial photo which you can view with Google Earth:
http://gearthblog.com/kmfiles/foo2006aerial.kmz
or with Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=http://gearthblog.com/kmfiles/foo2006aerial.kmz&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=38.411941,-122.840989&spn=0.002661,0.003777&t=k&om=1
I did wonder why it appeared everyone had skipped on the opportunity to do something like this!
Until the full flyover image is added to the default Google Earth layer I’ve created an image overlay.
It’s a shame the pink one’s foot blew away. They came out pretty damn well though!
so nice
Google are encouraging Sydneysiders to do something similar on Australia Day … bet it won’t be half as cool as those though!
Hehe, that is excellent. Such a cool project!
All that planning and they brought apples to weigh down the papers. Oversight.
Cool project, though.
we’re putting on an animation festival in Portland Or. This would be a great fit in our installations area.
I’m still trying to figure out which of the blobs I am. Tom and I think I may be the blob that’s sorting out the sort of dagger thingumy, but it’s really hard to tell.
Oh, if only we had been lying down!
That’s awesome! Gotta love Space Invaders. 🙂
How do you add the updated photos to Google??
How did you know when they would take that picture, or did you sent an airplane over there to take it 😉
Way cool 🙂 (You see to’ve missed me off the list of little helpers, but hey, it was more fun making it than anything else 🙂
Sheesh, how can employees have so much time to waste when there are people like me who cannot get or keep a job due to disabilities! Quit playing around and get back to work! 😉
yeah, ya jerks. randolph is right. having fun on the job is not allowed. i cant believe you would use your awesome artistic talents to make cool stuff on the ground like that. its people like you who are encouraging youngsters to be the next picasso. you should be grounded
Haha, thats a neat little project 🙂 i like the creative minds behind it 🙂
i love you google